Engage
Outreach
FLEET is committed to communicating science to students, schools and the wider community. FLEET is currently developing a program to deliver to school students, working with Growing Tall Poppies Science Partnership, STEM Professionals in Schools, the Australian Institute of Policy and Science, and the ARC Science of Learning Research Centre to bring FLEET research to students across Australia. If you or your school would like to be involved with FLEET, please contact us at education@fleet.org.au
Home Science Activities
FLEET aims to make science more accessible to the wider community, and bring science to even the youngest Australians. We encourage families to do activities at home that foster a love for science from an early age. To help encourage future scientists, FLEET provides fun, easy home science activities and experiments. Check back here for a new activity each week.
Outreach events
Outreach News
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
