With a programme dedicated to schools, FUTURES2021 is taking research directly into the classroom to engage young people with groundbreaking research taking place across the South West.
The FUTURES in Schools programme features a range of exciting activities from hands-on demonstrations, immersive theatre, participatory workshops to interactive discussions with researchers.
Hosted aboard Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s iconic passenger steamship the S.S. Great Britain, the schools’ Research Fair offer students a fun, interactive and engaging way to discover more about STEM. Students will meet science and technology researchers and take part in hands-on experiments, demos and simulations to understand how research is tackling some of the environmental and societal problems of today.
With a dedicated FUTURES Zone, I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here supports students to engage with STEM by connecting them with scientists and engineers from South West universities through online text-based live chats. Over the course of their chats students get to hear about the real-world applications of their classroom learning and gives them insight into what researchers at local universities are up to.
Students get to have a go at hands-on activities inspired by research and over a live-video call meet the researcher behind the activity. Students get the opportunity to discuss the activity, and to answer questions about their research, how and why they became a researcher, and what it is like to be a researcher.
A team of extraordinary engineers invite us into their Research And Test Lab (RATLab), where they use cutting-edge medical science and puppetry to help rugby sports star Ronnie get back to the playing field after a terrible injury. This immersive show engages students in learning more about bones, the mechanics of how our bodies move and how engineers might be able to fix them when they go wrong. Created in collaboration between University of Bath’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and theatre company Green Ginger, RATLab is an interactive show about biomechanics.
Writing FUTURES! is a participatory workshop with published authors and researchers heading into schools to engage students with creative writing, empowering them to write their own simple short stories or poems and share their work with their peers to improve their writing and confidence. The workshops will encourage children to use creative writing to create new worlds and explore them. Developed by creative writing incubator Paper Nations and Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Transcultural Creativity and Education.