This was my second year participating with the UHN Take Our Kids To Work Day program. My work colleague, Anthony, and I, share the passion of spreading the love for science among kids. Last year, when Anthony approached me with the idea of collaborating on the #KidsToWork program for UHN Research, I was more than thrilled!
Each of us tend to have many passions. But when an opportunity to pursue it presents itself, it's imperative to act upon it. For #KidsToWork Day, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to showcase science as being fun, cool and interesting! Anthony and I are by-products of a career path that is not 'traditional' in science. I like to call people like us as 'science hybrids' since we tend to combine skills learnt through multiple sources; and evolve into professional roles that allow us to communicate across many platforms. These are not the jobs we thought we will pursue when we were in high school. However, sticking to a science education helped us grow into roles and unlock unchartered career paths, or 'The Road Less Traveled'! :P
When we did our first talk at the #KidsToWork in 2013, our purpose was to leave the students with a message that science is cool and that it opens doors that may not even exist right now. We attempted this by talking about the non-traditional career options with a science degree. We brought in the 'cool' jobs such as bionics engineer, user experience video game designer, ESPN statisticians, etc. We tried our best to engage the students. We were interactive, asked them questions, gave them CANDY! We really wanted to be 'one' of them. We even hosted a dance-off on the popular youtube viral video of 2013, "who let the dogs out"! At the end of the day, we were marginally confident that our message went across. Not bad for a first attempt.
In all this excitement of being 'one' with the kids, we didn't realize that we unintentionally introduced the barrier of 'powerpoint'. Our 'talk' was no longer cool and interesting, it was just a 'presentation'... a 'ppt'.
With the learning from last year, we decided not to use powerpoint as a crutch. The challenge was to make it interactive and engage the students as much as possible. The key was keeping it simple.We started out by splitting the group into 2. We gave them 2 minutes to pen down what they like and dislike about science. We also wanted to know the kind of jobs they think they can get with science education. We made it into a competition where the losing team will have to go through the Ice Bucket Challenge (November is quite cold in Toronto!). By making it a competition, we noticed the kids were more enthusiastic and involved. We were able to get a lot more participation by making it a 'game'. The second part of our activity involved finding out about the interests of the kids outside of school, e.g. gaming, blogging, writing, designing, arts, travel, photography, etc. Each kid was given a sheet to fill out. This is where Anthony and I had a chance to go around the room, talk to the kids and tell them how they can combine their specific interest with an education in science and unlock career paths that they may not have known about.
The set up this year was not as formal as the one we had last year, but I think we took a step forward in the right direction.
Each of us tend to have many passions. But when an opportunity to pursue it presents itself, it's imperative to act upon it. For #KidsToWork Day, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to showcase science as being fun, cool and interesting! Anthony and I are by-products of a career path that is not 'traditional' in science. I like to call people like us as 'science hybrids' since we tend to combine skills learnt through multiple sources; and evolve into professional roles that allow us to communicate across many platforms. These are not the jobs we thought we will pursue when we were in high school. However, sticking to a science education helped us grow into roles and unlock unchartered career paths, or 'The Road Less Traveled'! :P
When we did our first talk at the #KidsToWork in 2013, our purpose was to leave the students with a message that science is cool and that it opens doors that may not even exist right now. We attempted this by talking about the non-traditional career options with a science degree. We brought in the 'cool' jobs such as bionics engineer, user experience video game designer, ESPN statisticians, etc. We tried our best to engage the students. We were interactive, asked them questions, gave them CANDY! We really wanted to be 'one' of them. We even hosted a dance-off on the popular youtube viral video of 2013, "who let the dogs out"! At the end of the day, we were marginally confident that our message went across. Not bad for a first attempt.
In all this excitement of being 'one' with the kids, we didn't realize that we unintentionally introduced the barrier of 'powerpoint'. Our 'talk' was no longer cool and interesting, it was just a 'presentation'... a 'ppt'.
With the learning from last year, we decided not to use powerpoint as a crutch. The challenge was to make it interactive and engage the students as much as possible. The key was keeping it simple.We started out by splitting the group into 2. We gave them 2 minutes to pen down what they like and dislike about science. We also wanted to know the kind of jobs they think they can get with science education. We made it into a competition where the losing team will have to go through the Ice Bucket Challenge (November is quite cold in Toronto!). By making it a competition, we noticed the kids were more enthusiastic and involved. We were able to get a lot more participation by making it a 'game'. The second part of our activity involved finding out about the interests of the kids outside of school, e.g. gaming, blogging, writing, designing, arts, travel, photography, etc. Each kid was given a sheet to fill out. This is where Anthony and I had a chance to go around the room, talk to the kids and tell them how they can combine their specific interest with an education in science and unlock career paths that they may not have known about.
The set up this year was not as formal as the one we had last year, but I think we took a step forward in the right direction.
