Education & Outreach

FLEET shares a responsibility to improve Australians’ engagement with science. Through its FLEET Schools and Public Outreach programs, we want to inspire and engage students and teachers at all levels, and the public about FLEET’s research, and to think critically about its value and application in society.

FLEET Schools: Here you will find home science activities, incursion/excursion opportunities, and student/teacher resources on curriculum-aligned topics that include critical thinking and hands-on activities, slides and worksheets;

Public outreach: FLEET heads out to engage the community through interactive exhibits at public events. FLEET has a pool of experts for public events, community talks. Evaluation reports of most of our outreach activities can be found here.

Learn more about FLEET research, education and outreach at

Ask the Physicists Facebook page.

FLEET’s facebook.com/FLEETCentre

twitter.com/FLEETCentre

FLEET’s YouTube channel.

Contact us education@fleet.org.au

 

 

Videos Outreach Events

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Outreach Events

Outreach News

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Remote outreach that’s also hands-on

FLEET scientists seeking new, creative ways to do science outreach found a silver lining in Covid-19 restrictions: they actually improved the experience for students. A team of FLEET-UNSW PhDs and early-career researchers (ECRs) was able to bridge 2020’s Covid restrictions to safely engage a classroom of students with virtual, but hands-on science. Led by PhD student Vivasha Govinden and node …

‘Pivoting’ to virtual: online lab tours in 2020

In the absence of in-house lab tours to introduce school students to working labs and researchers, in 2020 FLEET developed and distributed a series of ‘virtual lab tours’, of varying levels of interactivity: Show-and-tell lab tour via webcam for John Monash Science School (JMSS) students at Clayton of FLEET laboratories at UNSW in Sydney (materials science), and Swinburne University in …

Members’ homescience

While FLEET’s face-to-face outreach efforts were necessarily limited in 2020, the Centre innovated new ways to keep our members involved in science outreach. Several FLEET members took advantage of lockdown to generate homescience experiments at home, with a seeming bias towards experiments that involved blowing something up or setting something on fire. (An insight into lockdown frustration perhaps, or just …

Hosting FLEET research seminars in 2020

FLEET turbo-charged our existing Centre-wide seminar series in 2020, with 10 research seminars – a significant increase from only four seminars in 2019. Very aware of the importance of Centre cohesion without inter-state travel and with many universities in lockdown, FLEET threw extra resources into monthly Zoom seminars, often overlapping with expanded ‘journal club’ meetings involving multiple interstate visitors. Two …

Hosting scientific meetings in 2020 (ICSCE10)

In January 2020 FLEET brought the 10th International Conference on Spontaneous Coherence in Excitonic Systems (ICSCE10) to Australia for the first time. Continuing this 15-year tradition from the global scientific community interested in various quantum phenomena, ICSCE10 was hosted at the Arts Centre Melbourne amidst smoke storms resulting from one of the worst bushfire seasons in Australia’s history. ICSCE10 brought …

Remote science-outreach ‘wow’s students

Distance and Covid will not stop science-outreach. Thank you Zoom!** **not a paid partnership : )  Students at Elsternwick Primary School in Victoria had the opportunity to learn about electrical power, in a hands-on exercise guided by on-screen FLEET members, and following two of the experiments from FLEET’s comprehensive Home Science library. “A unanimous ‘WOW!’ came from all four classrooms …