SCIENCE YEAR NEWSLETTER - ISSUE 34 Week ending Friday, 14th September 2001 And... we're off the starting blocks! Science Year is officially up and running. Two months of organisational midnight oil-burning paid off on Friday 7th September, with a glitch-free, multi-media extravaganza satellite-linked between eight venues across the UK. For the full rundown and pictures from the day, visit our launch day diary x THE GIANT JUMP Was ... truly GIANT. A million children in over 5000 schools simultaneously jumped in their playgrounds at 11.00am sharp, and from the emails we've had, it seems everyone had a great day. "Serious fun, serious science," as Director Nigel Paine put it. Press coverage of the event turned out to be enormous - every national newspaper carried pictures and articles about the Giant Jump, as did 200 regional and 30 overseas papers. Local radio reporters turned out in force at nearby schools, and BBC TV News, ITV, CNN, Sky and Good Morning America all devoted airtime to it too. As Lord Puttnam, the Chair of NESTA (who manage Science Year), later observed, "the breadth of international media coverage astounded me - we couldn't have hoped for that in our wildest dreams." THE RESULTS Enough of the press coverage - what about the earth-shaking effects of the jump? A huge number of results were recorded in individual playgrounds, and these have been arriving in our offices thick and fast. So thank you very much for all the hard work on the home-made seismometers and other vibration-detectors. And whilst, for example, children at Stifford Primary School were disappointed to find that the water in their ice cream tub did not move... the students at Broadoak school got a fantastic trace on their Swing Thing. As for the OVERALL results: the earth definitely moved wherever people were jumping... although the movement was not always detectable, and initial results suggest the Jump didn't register nationally on the UK's seismic network. However, many people were able to record significant results in their immediate area. That's because although the energy given out by a dense crowd of people jumping in a playground was substantial, the high frequency waves which resulted were rapidly absorbed by the ground, in other words they didn't travel far from the school. We'll shortly be putting together the final results from the British Geological Survey, with results from sites around the country, and the observational records. These will appear on the Science Year website next week, and will help you to explore in more detail how the effects of the Giant Jump affected the UK. All that jumping certainly rocked the UK - seismologists have likened the vibration to 1/100th of an average earthquake. TWO NEW WORLD RECORDS Meanwhile, congratulations to all our enthusiastic jumpers. The Giant Jump could not have happened without you. Two new world records were set ..... the only thing we have to do now is to prove it. So if you jumped with the Jump, send us your witness statement now (the form and our address is on the bottom of this email, just in case you need it). Please return these forms, without them we won't be able to count you in our records. CAPTURED ON FILM We've received dozens of pictures from schools participating in the Giant Jump, these will be compiled and posted on the website shortly. Thank you very much for each of these - they're fantastic! Please send us any others you'd like us to include as soon as you can. Incidentally, Roxanna Dixon at Ivybridge Community College has had an idea for an entertaining staffroom activity which other teachers may like to copy. She's launched a Best Caption competition for two photos of her co-workers in mid-leap. (And you were lookin' good, if we may say so, Mr Sweney and Mr Cuthbertson - the "auditioning for Riverdance" caption not withstanding!) SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? There's a busy calendar of Science Year events ahead - check out the Events section of the Science Year website for more details. And keep coming back, because the schedule is expanding all the time. If you've got a science project planned that you'd like to associate with Science Year, you'll also find all the information you need on the website, this time in the 'About' area. And if you're a teacher ... you'll find extra information on how to make the most of Science Year at:www.ase.org.uk SCIENCE CENTRESTAGE One of the first Science Year projects to get underway is a national festival of science-related drama: Science Centrestage. This is a new initiative from The Wellcome Trust, and it's aimed at 11-16 year olds and their teachers. The idea is to use drama to communicate science, and the scheme will give pupils the opportunity to collaborate with both actors and scientists on a piece of drama exploring some of the social and ethical issues raised by advances in biomedical research. Schools participating in Science Centrestage will initially attend one of ten free one-day regional workshops in November. Following the workshops, they'll have 3 months to develop a 20 minute performance for a regional festival in March 2002. And the best of these will then be invited to perform again at a prestigious national theatre in April. Throughout the project, funding is available for travel costs and teacher supply cover. If you want to find out more, visit: www.wellcome.ac.uk/centrestage or email Briget Holligan at the Oxford Trust at: bridgeth@oxtrust.org.uk to ask for a leaflet and booking form. PUT YOUR TEACHER ON THE SPOT! If you're a teacher, you need to know about this ...! From Monday, Channel 4 will be screening five short films in the spaces between their regular schools programmes. They may not sound like very long TV slots, and they're not - but they're long enough to give 14 year-old presenter Misha Badr-Safdari time to dash around her kitchen and conduct a superquick and baffling experiment. Each film ends with her challenging her young audience to "PUT YOUR TEACHER ON THE SPOT!" You may well know your scientific custard powder from your yeast extract already, and in that case have nothing to fear from your pupils' questions - but just in case, you'll find teachers' notes on the Science Year website, and we'll be adding extra experiments next week that can be tried at home. GRANT SCHEME FOR SCIENCE COMMUNICATION PROJECTS Meanwhile, do you have a science communication project you need funding for? Perhaps COPUS can help. Copus, the national umbrella body for organisations and individuals involved in communicating science, has relaunched its grant scheme to support interactive projects to engage people with the contemporary issues and ideas linked with science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine. And projects that qualify for Science Year branding are amongst the priorities for the next round. There are three different types of grant available, and information and application packs can be ordered by phone (020 7451 2582), e-mail grants@copus.org.uk or from http://www.copus.org.uk RECOMMENDED WEBSITE OF THE WEEK In case there's a huge gap in your life where preparations for the Giant Jump used to be, this week's recommendation has loads of suggestions for experiments you can carry out at home. It's called HunkinsExperiments and it can be found at http://www.hunkinsexperiments.com (Please let us know which ones you enjoy most, as it will help guide future experiments that'll be featured on the Science Year website during the next twelve months. JOKE OF THE WEEK And, never afraid to be controversial, we start with a dig against mathematicians... Three men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices far." So he leans over the basket and yells out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times). 15 minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're lost!!" One of the men says, "That must have been a mathematician." Puzzled, one of the other men asks, "Why do you say that?" The reply: "For three reasons...... (1) he took a long time to answer, (2) he was absolutely correct, and (3) his answer was absolutely useless." Thank you, Philip Whitehead for sending that in to us. Any challengers? And... a real life observation on the wisdom of very young scientists. This was sent in by A P Harmsworth who's in the Physics Department at Cambridge University, and it's from the Los Angeles Times, Jan 13, 1997. He says he hopes it tickles our communal fancy! Janet Reid was driving her daughter westward after the Malibu fires, when the smoke in the sky made everything look surreal. "Ooh, Wendy, look at the sun," she told her daughter. "It looks like a big ball of fire." The 3-year-old preschooler replied: "It is a big ball of fire." ANY OTHER BUSINESS Please let us know if you have any events you'd like to let us know about, or any comments, thoughts, ideas or jokes for the newsletter. Please send any newsletter or website enquiries to anne.mcnaught@scienceyear.com, and any information/enquiries about forthcoming events or the Giant Jump to sophie.duncan@scienceyear.com And have a great week! Download the World Record Witness Statement here – if you took part in the Giant Jump and haven’t sent this form back to us – please do so now! Send it to: World Records, Science Year, 11 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3QB. Return to archive