Planning and Hosting an Impactful and Educational STEM Outreach Event

Introduction

As a student society, education is at the heart of what we do. To inspire the next generation of rocketeers and give students experiences we wish we had at their age we travel to schools across Scotland to deliver STEM-focused workshops to primary and secondary pupils. We have a variety of different events; from building and launching plastic bottles fashioned into rockets, to teaching the basics of coding, to demonstrating how to build your first CV. However, one of our biggest challenges we've found has been figuring out how to plan, set up, and host these events, as we had to learn as we went, without much guidance. With this article, we hope to reach anyone struggling with similar issues and offer up some tips and tricks we have picked up over time.

Sourcing Contacts

The easiest way to start off a bank of contacts, is to build from people you already know. Think of getting in touch with former teachers, or anyone you might know that works in an educational environment. From there, many teachers or education professionals will be able to give further advice on how to get in touch with more people in their area. In the best-case scenario, teachers will contact people they know in other institutions informing them of the kind of opportunities you can provide and recommending the event to them for their own pupils. We have been very fortunate in this aspect, where we have been recommended by teachers to teachers, and have received requests to run events in different schools.

Planning the event

When it comes to actually planning the outreach event, you should first consider what activities will happen on the day. The best way to keep yourself right about this is to have a document outlining the full timeline for the event; this is also helpful to have to send out to contacts when trying to plan a future event.

Important things to consider are:

• An outline of the workshop.
• What the learning outcomes of the outreach event are.
• What materials are required for the workshop and are you going to provide them or if the school needs to?
• What the recommended age range for the workshop is and how many students you can run the day with? With the number of students, think about how many volunteers you need to bring along with you in order to run the event as effectively as possible.
• A timeline of the day, factoring in set up and clean up times – Is it a half-day or full-day event? If it is a full day, make sure to factor in plenty of time for breaks.

In order to plan the outreach day, we start by reaching out to our bank of contacts with the workshop document to see if there is any interest from schools. Once we have received interest from a school, we will work with them to find a time for the workshop that works for us both. It is important to remember that your availability is just as important as the schools, make sure to plan the event for a time when an adequate number of people can volunteer to come along to run the event.

Tips and Tricks for the Day

There are a couple of things you can do to ensure that the day runs as smoothly as possible. Asking your contact from the school if you can get there early to set up is key, it means when the pupils come in the event can start straight away at the time you had agreed upon. Keeping kids engaged can be hard, things like turning some aspects of the workshop into a small competition is a good way to keep them interested, and small prizes like certificates can work well as an incentive for them to enthusiastically participate. For workshops with older children, a presentation on what the society does, and current projects can encourage pupils to think about a career or further education in STEM, demonstrations of any projects that can be brought along work well for this as well, and visual aids can be very helpful for some children to grasp exactly what it is you’re trying to teach them.

Conclusion

As a university society, educational outreach has a wide range of benefits. Being able to offer experiences to students who may have otherwise not considered a STEM career, or to re-energise someone's already existing passion is rewarding. Simplifying what we do in a way that primary and secondary pupils can understand in turn helps us to better understand what we do and why we do it. An extra bonus is being able to talk about our programme with potential sponsors, as we try to expand our existing events, and occasionally - if we're lucky - this is something they can help us with.