BREESI Follow Up Projects

If you wish to develop a Wind Energy or Renewable Energy project, please check the organisations listed below which offer financial support (from £600 to £3,000) to schools for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) project work.  Several local primary schools we have worked with have successfully applied to the Royal Society for Partnership Grants, and we can help you with your application.

Royal Societyhttps://royalsociety.org
Follow Grants, Schemes & Awards, thenTraining, mentoring and partnership and Awards and Partnership Grants.

Institute of Physics  www.iop.org
Follow About, then Support and Grants, then School Grant Scheme.

You may wish to submit your project to Sentinus for inclusion in the Junior Innovators Exhibition (Big Bang), normally held in June at Ulster University at Jordanstown.  See the Sentinus website www.sentinus.co.uk follow Primary, then Junior Innovators @ The Big Bang for information on public display of your project.  You may also wish to present your project at a school assembly, or at a Board of Governors meeting.  Sentinus or W5 may be able to provide an Ambassador, an engineer who can help you to prepare and develop your project.

Your project may also count towards a Crest Award.  See www.crestawards.org.

Presentation

In many programmes the end point for pupils is a presentation, either on a table and stand or an electronic presentation, for example by Powerpoint or similar electronic formats.  This information is aimed at pupils presenting material to an audience outside their classroom, either at a programme celebration event or to schoolpupils, parents or governors.  Some of these points are obvious, but it’s useful to restate them here.

Presenting electronically

Your electronic presentation might follow this pattern:

-  introduction (about 5 - 15% of the total number of slides).  This should briefly describe the background, and outline how you intend to develop your theme.

-  development (about 75 - 80%).  This should be a series of slides, each describing a single item within your topic.  Use pictures, diagrams and possibly video, to help explain your ideas.

-  conclusion (also about 5 - 15%).  This should look back at the introduction, and give the audience the main message of the summary.  It should not include new material at this stage.

It may be useful to start from this pattern, and develop your material as necessary if it doesn’t fit.

Make sure your lettering on the screen stands out: use contrast.  Avoid gimmicks like bouncing letters in illustrations and screen changes.  Use photographs and audio and visual material, like audio or video clips, where appropriate. Keep your text to no more than eight lines per screen, and make sure your font size is big enough to be read clearly from anywhere in the room or lecture theatre (sans serif bold (like this: Calibri)), at least 20 point).  Don’t overlap text and photographs, unless this is necessary to make a point.

Speak clearly.  Make sure you can be heard: use amplification if available.  Speak directly to the audience, not to the screen, and establish eye contact with the audience.  If there is a single microphone, speak closely into it, and then pass it quickly to the next speaker.

Try not to read your material: use headings on screen or notes on a page and develop these, rather than having a full text to read.  But it might be useful to read your first sentence to get you going.

Use your hands for emphasis (but not too wildly, especially if you are holding a microphone).

Get your timing right.  Practice a couple of times with a school audience, and time your presentation.  Consider giving a presentation to your teachers or perhaps your Board of Governors.  Decide what can be expanded or contracted to fit a different audience.

If available, use a laser pointer to draw attention to key points on the screen, rather than finger point.

Try not to get in front of the projector, or between your audience and the screen.

Make sure that you relate the level of your presentation to your audience.  They may be familiar with science in general, but not with the details of your topic.  Spell out any initials the audience may not be familiar with.

Get someone to check your presentation for spelling, punctuation and grammar.  Remember to check for US / English spelling of words like meter / metre.

Presenting on a table and stand

Tables and stands vary in size, but a typical set-up would be a table approximately 1 metre square in front of a vertical stand of surface area about 2 square metres.

Assume that text and images on your stand must be readable by a visitor standing outside the table, about 1 – 2 metres from the stand.  Try a range of type sizes in school to decide what is most effective at this distance (large enough to read, but not taking too much space).  Some of your text should include questions relevant to your project for guests to consider.

Ensure that the items you place on the table are relevant to your project, and related to the text on your stand.

It may be useful to have copies of a short summary for visitors to take away.