Case Study: I’m a Mathematician, Get me out of here - Christmas Lectures Zone

Audience group: Primary or Elementary, Lower secondary or Middle school, Upper secondary or High school, Sixth Form or Junior College

Audience interest level: Uninterested, Receptive, Engaged

Topics: Probability, modelling, statistics, algorithms, machine learning, STEM careers

Origins of the Project

The I’m a Mathematician, Get me out of here Christmas Lectures Zone was commissioned by the Royal Institution and produced by the team behind I’m a Scientist with support from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, UKRI, KPMG, and Schlumberger.

The aims of I’m a Mathematician are to support students to see STEM subjects as something ‘for them’ by breaking down barriers around who can study STEM. This is done by connecting students with working mathematicians in live instant messaging-style chats, with opportunities to submit follow-up questions.

The Christmas Lectures Zone offered students a chance to meet scientists and mathematicians whose work linked to the theme of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: ‘Secrets and lies: The hidden power of maths’, and to explore the surrounding mathematic, scientific, societal, and ethical themes.

Practicalities

The Christmas Lectures Zone ran from 6 to 31 January 2020, and followed the convention of our tried-and-tested I’m a Scientist Zones. Students can take part in live, text-based Chats with mathematicians, submit follow-up questions, and vote for their favourite mathematician.

The Christmas Lectures studio audience were given access to the Zone through question cards distributed during the filming. Questions submitted on these cards were uploaded to the Zone, and accounts created to allow audience members to receive email notifications when their questions were answered (for those who provided email addresses).

Teacher applications for the Zone were opened to all schools in November 2019. Teachers registered on the UK I’m a… activities lists were emailed invites to take part. Promotion was also carried out via Twitter, via the Association for the Teaching of Maths newsletter, and the Ri sent out information through their channels.

Keeping this activity online makes it particularly valuable for rural schools which may not otherwise receive face-to-face science enrichment. Schools who took part were spread across Great Britain, from Fife to Torfaen. Unfortunately not all teachers were given a place; this event was oversubscribed with 71 teachers applying and 57 being offered a place.

There are a lot of benefits to text-only live Chats: Evening the playing field between students and scientists, giving all students an equal voice in the classroom, and creating an environment that is less pressured for students asking questions. This in turn makes the Chats accessible for scientists and students who otherwise would not be comfortable participating in face-to-face engagement, such as SEN and ALN students.

This is reflected in the popularity of the event. In total, we registered 1,156 users, who asked 1,037 questions and wrote 15,866 lines of live Chat.

Evaluation

Generally, there are two main strands to our evaluation for all I’m a… activities:

• Formative​ — We continually review our activities and look for improvements in what we do and how we do it. To this aim we use web metrics, observation of schools during the event, and interviews with scientists and teachers after the activity.
• Summative​ — Using site metrics we can see how students and scientists are interacting: How many questions are asked, how many votes are cast, which are the most active schools and scientists, and other measures.

After each Zone, we collate the data we find in an evaluation report.

Although the quantity of Chats taking place was higher, the quality of the enrichment didn’t suffer. One teacher’s feedback highlighted the fact that I’m a Mathematician supports students to see mathematicians as ‘normal people’: “[I’m a Mathematician] was a great opportunity to engage students with maths and give them an insight into where mathematics could take them in the real world beyond school and studies. Our students enjoyed chatting to the mathematicians and it helped them to see that mathematicians aren’t just ‘professor types’ working in universities but mostly they are real people with similar interests to themselves!”

The event also had positive outcomes for the participating scientists and mathematicians. One mathematician fed back in a post-event survey: “Logging in to talk to the classes was incredibly convenient. Often doing outreach takes up half a day or a whole day, where here I managed to easily incorporate a session into the middle of my working day. It made a nice break too.”

We hope to run more I’m a Mathematician events in the future.

More information

Website for I’m a Mathematician: imamathematician.uk

Archived CHRISTMAS LECTURES Zone: secrets.imamathematician.uk

Our evaluation report on the Christmas Lectures Zone