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The following is a report of my visit to The Investigator Science and Technology Centre in Adelaide and the recommendations I submitted to my centre, Science Alive! The fellowship program was most valuable, both for collecting information and ideas and for making contacts that Science Alive! Staff can use in the future. The staff at the Investigator were very helpful and made every effort to ensure that my time with them was beneficial and enjoyable. Thank you to ASTEN for giving me this opportunity. Marketing At the beginning of each year The Investigator sends out a poster, calendar and a teacher update to each school in the metropolitan area. This has information on some of the programs available but not all of them. Each school gets one copy addressed to a specific person with a tick box on it to ensure each teacher gets to read the brochure. Term updates are sent as a one-page flyer. The educators are responsible for making up their own brochures and sending them out using a database so the brochures are addressed to a specific person. To obtain these names, a fax is sent to all schools annually with room for the school to nominate a person to receive The Investigator information. There is an education sub-committee that meets once a month. This committee consists of teachers from private and public schools, the curriculum officer for the Government Education Department and Science Teachers' Association members. It was formed to help The Investigator with ideas on good ways of promoting to teachers and to discuss teacher needs and wants. Recommendations for Science Alive! " Put a
sticker with tick boxes on the front of each of our program's brochures
to make sure they circulate. Funding For small amounts
(up to $10,000), the funding for general programs is worked on by
the Public Relations Manager. The education team for example may
say they would like to upgrade their maths program so the PR Manager
will decide on a course of action. This usually will involve sending
out a letter to an appropriate company asking for a specific amount
of money (eg $5,000 in this case). They will be told what their
funds would be used for specifically. Once the letter is sent out
she will then follow up with a phone call. If they do receive the
money the education team will send a report to the company on how
the program is going. Recommendations
for Science Alive! Day Outreach Programs The Investigator has four such outreach programs. These consist of a choice of four half hour shows that cost $100 per show. Schools that lie outside the Metropolitan area are charged extra for transport. The shows are run for groups of up to 100 students. Information on shows available is sent out at the beginning of each year to schools and pre-schools. If there are any special deals on (eg during Science Week they offered shows for $75) schools will receive an extra faxout. Recommendations for Science Alive! The show scripts
could be great for our pre-school market as two of the scripts work
very well with them. Both "Balloons" and "Music"
are easy to set up and run with and work well with this age group.
To look into the idea of introducing these programs we would need
to look at: Some of the shows are more appropriate for primary school students. Although they may not fit into our existing programs, they could be useful for the after school and holiday programs option. Week-long Outreach Programs As well as going on day outreaches, staff also go on week-long outreaches. Schools are contacted with a phone call to see if they are interested and a timetable much like ours is set up. The day outreaches run with 3 classes at a time for a total of an hour and a half. Half an hour is spent at each station: one group in the stardome; another watching a show; and the third group using the hands-on exhibits. Recommendations for Science Alive! These outreaches differ from ours substantially. To implement something like this would mean a major change in our programs. However this type of set-up may be good for holiday programs. The Stardome The Investigator hires out the Stardome for a day or half a day at a time. Most of the staff are confident in taking the classes. They take classes from pre-school to high schools. Recommendations for Science Alive! " We could
look at costings and all come up to speed with the Stardome and
taking classes in it. The Investigator notes may be very useful
with this. Pre visit Material The educators are in the process of putting their pre-visit material onto the Internet. This is a huge saving on photocopying and postage and time! Recommendations for Science Alive! Posting pre-visit material on the web would be a great asset to us as it will save a lot of time and money. A good way to start this will be to put the most popular programs material on the web and see how this works with the teachers. Someone will have to learn how to put information on our website and teach other employees. Teacher Development The educators run full-day workshops at The Investigator. The main one they run is based on Mathemania and involves making maths puzzles. These have proved popular as teachers in Australia have a compulsory amount of professional development and this will count towards that. Sessions cost $85 per person and run with a maximum of 18 teachers. Recommendations for Science Alive! These could be really good for us if we implement the Mathemania class. The teacher development program has ideas on what we could do. Note that teachers each get to make a copy of one puzzle from the existing Mathemania class using equipment provided. |
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