Wisconsin Public Television Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Connecting Scientists and Lifelong Learners Dennis Schatz  April 25, 2012 UP717 CC >> Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen and I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, including the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Wisconsin Public Television, and PLATO, and the Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you a UW Madison alum who's also a leader in the field of informal science learning. His name is Dennis Schatz. He's from Colorado, but he went to school here in the late '60s. He was on the Wisconsin Union Directorate Board, so he got to see Union South, the new Union South, for the first time for his visit this time. I think he was pretty pleased with what he's seen. After getting a degree in physics here at UW Madison in 1969, he went to Berkeley and got his graduate degree. 

He spent some time in Australia. He worked at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, and then he moved up to the Pacific Science Center. He is now Senior Vice President of Education at the Pacific Science Center, and he's on loan to this place called the National Science Foundation. Some of you know that I was on loan to the National Science Foundation. They sent me back. [LAUGHTER] They've kept Dennis and we hope for a long time, but I think you get three years. >> Two years. >> Okay. He's here in Madison in part because of the science denial conference that was held on Monday and Tuesday morning. It's going to be filed up by the science de-Amazon conference next year, and we're delighted to have him here on campus Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. 

Yes, that was a geographical river pun that didn't go anywhere. So, tonight Dennis is going to talk to us about several things, including a program that he started about five years ago called Portal to the Public. Because so many of you are involved so much and in so many ways in lifelong learning and science and especially here at the university, I think he's got a particularly great topic for us to hear about where he's going with this and what the future of informal science learning and getting scientists to connect to and talk with and listen to, learners of all ages, especially at his place, the Pacific Science Center, and things we might learn by doing that here at UW Madison and at other locations around Wisconsin. So, please join me in welcoming Dennis Schatz to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you, Tom. It's great to be here. It is wonderful to come back to Madison. I enjoyed my years here. Although, it was that tumultuous time, 1965-1969. I was vice president of the student Union, and I can remember at least one time when you couldn't even get into the student Union while I was here. 

And I have to admit, I was on the committee associated with the Union that designed the Union South that just got torn down. So it's interesting to see the second iteration of Union South, and it is a delightful place. The hotel which I'm staying at is just magnificent. The food's been good. It's been really nice to be over there. It's been nice to be here in springtime too when it's nice. What I want to talk about primarily is about our program called Portal to the Public which connects research scientists, now when I say research scientist of course everybody immediately thinks of scientists at the university, especially here or at NOAA or something of that sort, and we actually, when we say scientist, it's a short term for science-based professionals. So there's lot of people out there that have a technical background. Technicians in labs, people who are in the health industry but aren't necessarily physicians, they all have a science background and know a great deal. So we think about getting people connected to public audiences. 

I'm from an informal science education institution, a big science center. As a matter of fact, if you haven't been there before, this is the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. It's the big white building. It was the US Science Pavilion during the 1962 World's Fair. And, actually, three days ago we celebrated our 50th anniversary. The fair opened October 22, 1962. Actually, that's not our celebration. That's when the US Science Pavilion opened. The Pacific Science Center is a private nonprofit opened on October 23rd, the day after the fair closed. A great urban myth, we got 35,000 people through the building a day during the fair. 

When we opened up the next day, the claim is one person came. I'm not sure why anybody would come at all since the fair had closed and I think everybody assumed that the building was probably closed too. But I've never figured out whether we could decide whether that's true or not. But it's a great building, great legacy that the federal government really provided for the Pacific Science Center and for the greater northwest. Of course, it always looks like this just in case you weren't sure what it was like in Seattle. [LAUGHTER] In case you'd like to come and visit no matter what. And so I have to admit that in order to talk about the importance of having scientists engage with public audiences, I need to go back and tell a little bit about why I got engaged. I think Tom might have said, so I was an astrophysicist. I went to the astronomy department here. Became a solar astrophysicist. 

I do like working during the day rather than at night, so that's lots of light. It's really great. The sun gives out lots of energy. You need a little telescope. But I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley, and as I, if you're with the university usually you have to start as a teaching assistant. You don't get to do all that great research. And I was totally frustrated by, one, how little or how difficult it was for students to understand basic astronomy content, the basic science. And even more so, I was frustrated by how poorly the university professors taught science. And so I was really, I did two years worth of graduate school, got essentially everything but my dissertation, and then decided I was going to be the best community college instructor in astronomy and physics that you could possibly imagine. I had figured out how to do it. 

And this next slide illustrates where I really, my big ah-ha related to science education. So if you're not familiar with astronomy, this is called the Hertzsprung Russell diagram. So temperature on the bottom. Brightness along the left side. In order to make it really challenging for most people to understand this, temperature goes from high temperatures on the left to low temperatures on the right. But it does go from low light, low brightness up to high brightness on the vertical axis. So in case you want to try and challenge people it's a good way to do it. And we use this to talk about, and we plot stars on them. So we plot their temperature and their brightness. We use it to talk about how  stars evolve. 

Again, you don't really have to know all this. But I went out, I was the best community college teacher you can image. I was concise, cogent, humorous, all those important things. And so in order to explain how stars evolve, you talk about stars begin as this huge ball of gas, and that means they're very big but they're low in temperature. So they're on the top right. So it starts on the top right, but as it coalesces, gravity pulls it together into a star, it gets smaller so it gets fainter but also gets hotter by compression. And so it moves down and to the left. Ultimately, it spends most of its time, all those dots up there are stars called the main sequence. Our sun is there now. Been there for four billion years or so. 

But sooner or later it runs out of hydrogen in the center, and it has to figure out how to get more fuel, and so what it does, I won't go into the details, it starts to expand into a red giant. So now it gets bigger. So it's brighter but it cools off. So what's it do? It goes back up to the top, up where the guy saying keep on trucking or that sun says keep on trucking, becomes a red giant for a while, and ultimately it comes back down to the lower left where it's a white dwarf star. The sun or a neutron star or something like that. So we talk about stars moving on the HR diagram. They start up the top right, they go down to the middle, they go back up to the top, and come down to the bottom. Very simple and we personify stars. It just amazes me. We talk about them being born. 

They have a midlife crisis and turn into a red giant. You'd think they were alive. And I have to admit, it was really a good, I had it down. I knew people understood what I was saying. So until about three days later, this student came up to me and said, you know, Mr. Schatz, I went out last night. I didn't see any stars come down, go back up, come back down. [LAUGHTER] And I knew that something was wrong with my presentation. This really put me on the road to trying to understand as a research scientist, or as a scientist, how can I be a better communicator of science? So this is a lifelong effort. Astronomy, we do it to people all the time. We have all these things we get know. 

I often call it your expert blind spot. Like, I understand it, why don't you understand it? It's so simple. So we often do things like this is a galaxy, hundred billion stars. This is what it looks like face-on, whatever face-on exactly means, and if you go around 90 degrees it looks like this. So just think about people going what's a galaxy? What's a hundred billion stars? Trying to understand what this all means. I'll skip that one. This is my favorite. Phases of the moon. Sun comes in from the right side, hits the moon, and because of its angle relative to the Earth you get different phases. What I think most people look at this and say is, gee, I didn't realize the Earth had 16 moons. 

[LAUGHTER] It really is confusing, and yet we expect people to understand this, and of course I'm so used to it. We get expert blind spot, makes it challenging. The challenge we run into is because this is a traditional view on education. My favorite. I taught stripe how to whistle. What a second, I don't hear him whistling. I said I taught him; I didn't say he learned it. [LAUGHTER] And what we end up focusing on is I teach all this stuff, and of course I teach it once. Learning isn't one-stop shopping. It's not like I just get information and I learn it all. 

You have to do it over and over again. But we don't focus on what people learn, we focus on what we taught them. And we need to shift what we're doing. This is a big part of our approach on thinking about scientists' involvement with public audiences. How do we get them thinking about the learning that's going on rather than I'm conveying information, I'm teaching, I taught it to them, they should understand it. So this is a lot of the philosophy that's behind here. The other thing that I want to point out, and this is all kind of background for the Portal to the Public, is we spend a lot of money, as you probably know, on formal education, especially K-12 education but even university education. And being from a science center, and informal science education institution as we say, we like to point out that people don't spend a whole lot of time in formal education. So this is a nice diagram going from preschool up to death, up past retirement. The yellow there is the number of hours or percentage of time in a day, in a 16-hour day, we eliminate the sleep time, 16-hour day, how much time is spent in formal education. 

And of course, a lot of that is in K-12, and then it gets a little bit less at higher education and then even later as you go into careers and so on in terms of formal education. We did a nice calculation. If you live to be 80 years old, that's not unreasonable these days, you spend 3% of your awake hours in K-12 classroom. Yet, we think that's where education is supposed to really happen, the bulk of it. You go off to college and university and so on, but really the big focus is getting people through K-12 education. There's a big blue sea out there of time, and you're all part of that in a way. You're here in the evening, lifelong learning as Tom said. It's that lifelong learning, and we talk about lifelong, life wide means it just doesn't happen in school. It happens at evening lectures. It happens at home. 

It happens had science centers. It's life wide and life deep because people tend to get excited about something. So not only might you learn about biology in school, you learn about botany in a science center, and then you go and get into gardening, and all of the sudden you have this deep knowledge, that's why it's life deep, deep knowledge about a science-based area. And so it's lifelong, life wide, life deep. That's what we're really after. So how do we use this time outside of school to really get people engaged in science, engineering, that type of thing. So that's really the focus of, first of all, that's really the purpose of informal science education institutions is to really use that deep blue sea, as we often call it. So, with that as a background, I want to talk about Portal to the Public and what we've learned from this. It's got a simple premise. Funded by the National Science Foundation, we have three museum partners and one research partner. 

And the goal with this was to develop, as it says, a scalable, proven program format or model of face-to-face interactions between scientists, and I'll go back and say science-based professionals, and public audiences at informal science education institutions, like science centers. We're the big kahuna. We have a million visitors a year. Very large, 200,000 square feet. The north museum, next one, 35,000 people visit a year. It's about four times the size of this auditorium. Not very big. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And then Explora, which has maybe 300,000 people a year, in Albuquerque. So different geographic areas, as well as size of institution. 

And the goal was really to prove this could work in many different locations. We come from a really science rich area. We have the other U-dub. Of course, we say U-dub versus UW. So we've got big universities. We've got research centers, a lot of biotech, National Cancer Institute Center, and so on. A lot of the other ones don't have the same. We wanted to prove it could work in many different locations. So that's the premise. How do we bring this face-to-face interaction, and I'll talk a lot about why we think this interaction is important. 

So just to give you a sense of what it's like before we talk about some of the elements of it. At the Pacific Science Center we have various different programs. One of the most significant is what we call our research weekends, polar science weekend, life science research weekend, the marine exploration weekend. This is from our polar science weekend. The person in the middle is the director of the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, big NSF research center. And the goal was to bring 50 to 100 scientists to this science center. We have a big, open display area. You can think of it as a science fair except it's not being done by high school students. It's being done by researchers showing off their wares. In this case, they're showing of a lot of the equipment they use to study the polar regions. 

But our goal is to have the kind of conversation that's going on here. Not only are they looking at materials, but it's really a time for personal interaction. People ask questions, understand more about what they're doing. Here's another example. We happen to have some ponds that are part of our science center. So here's a marine scientist training one of our young visitors how to throw a sampling net to capture, you can see the little fish in the ponds. They understand what scientists do to go out sampling of animals out in the ocean or out on a river, whatever it may be. And, actually, the sub-theme of the marine science weekend was not all scientists wear lab coats. This proves it. I'm not sure they all wear Hawaiian shirts. 

[LAUGHTER] It puts a human face on scientists. So this is now from our life sciences research weekend. On the lower left is a very high tech mannequin. You can take its blood pressure. You can stop its heart, start its heart, lots of things you can do. But this is, again, an interaction. Kids can feel the pulse of the mannequin, but they were then also doing their own. It gives us interaction between the scientist and the person. And really brings us, again, a human face on science. This is a scientist from the University of Washington who studies tsunamis. 

Again, sometimes there are hands-on activities Sometimes he has a computer simulation that he's showing, but he also has a hands-on device there with a vortex device. Great role model. When you think about all the things that you want to accomplish to encourage people to go into a stem field, you want to have that, who do you connect with the most? The people you get to know. So the goal is to have people so they get to know people. These are two graduate students in geology. They're using therapeutic Silly Putty in the yellow and the green up there. I never knew before in my life that Silly Putty came in different viscosities. But it's used for, if you're building up your hand muscle you start with the stuff that's easy to squeeze, and then you go to the more. So they use it to talk about glacier flow. So nice hands-on, very visual activity, and then you can see the computer. 

So they then translated that back to their research in modeling what they were doing. So you make this nice transition between hands-on, concrete activity to a more abstract computer activity. Great role model. I really liked it because there were always so many young girls around these graduate students. This is a NOAA scientist. So not all from the University of Washington. There are other scientists out there. This is a NOAA orca specialist. She studies orca DNA. She wants to know which baby goes with which adult and which adult goes with which other adult and so on. 

So she had an activity that dealt with orca relationships. So, the question is, how do you make something like this successful? And I have to admit, I've got to step back and appreciate what Tom has done and so many other people. When I came here in 2006 and I was back here today to see the -- center and all of the outreach programming that happens here at my alma mater. Kind of a button popper, as a friend of mine would say, it's great to see this. A lot of this is already happening. I have to admit, that the kind of engagement with the public audiences here are really wonderful, but we were starting new. We didn't really have a lot of engagement at Pacific Science Center with scientists, and we brought in a group of people and said so what's it take to do that? If you want to have scientists come, you can just come on over, but if we want to have the most effective programming, we want to make sure that scientists are doing the kind of education experience, learning experience, that meets our standards. We have pretty high standards when it comes to interacting with the public. So these are some of the things that were suggested by our group of experts that came. Actually, Tom was not part of the first meeting, but he was part of the second meeting. 

So the big thing was to really make sure that scientists understood or kind of got out in front some of what they considered their weaknesses, their strengths, their fears. Many scientists come, and especially if you're in a public institution like ours, we get 5,000 people a day through. Families moving around, it's like I've got to work with all those people? Wait a second, how do I do that? Certainly, communication skills. I went through as a research scientists, nobody taught me how to, when I became a TA, I'll never forget I'm a new TA, UC Berkeley, what am I supposed to do? Go talk to the other TAs. So and so was a TA last year, go talk to them. So I went and talked to Fred Rife was his name. Okay, Fred, tell me what am I supposed to do? Oh, you do as little as possible. [LAUGHTER] So what do you do? Well, you go to the recitation session and discussion session, and you ask if they have any questions and you answer their questions. I'm kind of going, well, so... That was my introduction and my training. 

I'm sure that's not unusual. And then, for us, it's really understanding public audiences. You come into a facility, you've got grandmother with two little kids, sometimes you have school groups or you have a group of all fifth graders. Other times you've got senior citizens that are coming. So our training involves thinking about what are you going to do for different kinds of people. I don't have time to go into all those things, but I'll talk about them a little bit. So, what is the focus? I'm going to give you a sample of some of the things we do with our scientists. Most important thing, I think this is good for any kind of communication, we talk a lot about how people learn. There's a lot of research that's been done on the basic understanding of how people learn. So we have that. 

Much of what you can do with people it what motivates them. You need to get to know your visitor. It's one thing to say I want you to understand, pick climate change, pick astronomy, but what determines a lot of what people understand what they learn, what they keep, and whether they stand talking to you or leave you is their motivation. So how do we know what their motivation is and build off of that? Certainly, working with groups of different ages is really important. We think it's important to have a mediating activity. It's not just a matter of my lecturing, which I'm doing right now, I can have a PowerPoint and be lecturing out there, but to really have something that engages the person into a conversation and illustrates the research that you're doing. So that's a critical part of it. One of the things that doesn't happen enough in education in general is number seven. We need to have time to reflect, to self-evaluate, get feedback, to practice. Often it's, here's the materials, go do this with the public. 

Well, wait a second, not only do I not know what I'm doing but I need to practice. I haven't figured out why we think, back to this whole learning thing, if I tell you something you should just know it. I taught it to you so that's sufficient. I think about, you don't go and play tennis by getting on the court and hitting the ball around a little bit and then being a perfect tennis player. What do you have to do? You have to practice. So if you're going to be a good communicator, then you need to figure out some ways to practice. And you'd like to start practicing, not with the 5,000 people that are coming through the science center. First of all, you start with your friends. So you start with other scientists because they're in the same boat you are, and then you do it with some of our staff who are really there to be a coach. And then you get to go out and try it with the public. 

And you really need to do it three or four times to feel that you're comfortable. So that's a really important part of it. And I didn't get to all of them, but it gives you a sense of it. So we decided it was really critical, actually what's also totally fascinating is that our first group, although they told us, they said you'll never get anybody to do this, scientists aren't going to come do this. Because what we wanted was a pretty good commitment. We wanted 20 hours, coming to have professional development of science communication so that they would meet our standards, and then a commitment of 20 hours of coming to the science center and doing activities with the public. That's 40 hours out of a year. This is a year long, and then we hope everybody will re-up for another 20 hours of interaction with the public which generally is true. So people don't have time. They don't think it's a priority. 

It is challenging. You've got to find those 40 hours. We've had no problem, and one reason we've had no problem is we developed a program, instead of saying please, please come and you don't really have to do too much, we turned it into an honor. We developed the Science Communication Fellows Program. So you have to apply. You have to say you really want to do this. We'll give you 20 hours of professional development at no cost. You come and give us 20 hours of work. We filled up all of our courses, if you want to call them courses. We now have over 250 science communication fellows. 

They get a certificate. For many graduate students, this is actually a nice thing to put on their CV. It shows that they've actually been through a training program, are a good science communicator. And the kinds of things that, going back to that list, that we do, one of the things that's really important is the workshops have all got to be interactive in nature. We can't just talk to people. You teach the way you were taught so that you have to have them be doing things so that they get an idea the kinds of things you want them to do out on the floor. So this gives you an example. We've got things with black boxes. This picture on the right is a little thing called a --, I think that's how you pronounce it. That bounces around and we do some basic science. 

One thing that we want to do is to remind scientist of why are they a scientist. I still haven't figured this out because, to a large extent, people come to, they teach science like it's a body of knowledge. Those astronomy professors I had, it's like this is how stars are formed. I did that. Here's how stars are formed. Here's what galaxies are. But if you ask them what excites them about science, it's the sense of discovering. It's going out and doing experimentation and exploring and making discoveries. So we really want to remind them at the very beginning that that's an important part of it. Then we have this whole thing, which I'm going to do one activity that relates to that, is how people learn. 

What are the things we need to know about how people learn so that we can use that information? And then the important thing, again, this is a chance to reflect, plan, and practice. And I have to point out, of course, this is all based upon the research that's been done around how people learn. So there's great books, these are all from the National Research Council, this is how people learn in general. Ready, Set, SCIENCE! is about learning in schools and Surrounded by Science is learning in informal environments. We use this within our, a lot of scientists, where's the evidence? It's an evidence-based profession so we have evidence to show them this is why you don't just lecture to people. So I want to spend some time so you get a sense of what we've done and why this is important to do an activity called building a common vision, or I like to call it getting beyond your expert blind spot. And to do this, you need to pair up. You need to find a person next to you. It's a little challenging in this room, but if some individual is here, so if people could get up and move around. And one of you is going to be a learner, and one of you is going to be a scientist conveying information. 

So pair up, decided who's going to be the scientist, who's going to be the learner, and I'm going to come around and give you information on how to do that. Okay? So pair up, get next to each other.  If the three of you want to work together, you can do that.  >> Tap your microphone. [TAPPING] There you go. >> Was it not working the whole time? >> No, it just went out. >> Did I really change what I was saying. This goes to the learner. >> All these go to the learner? >> Yeah, just one per learner. >> One per learner. 

>> Yeah, no color coding. Okay, we're now handing out a folder to the learner. One per learner.  Just go like this and I'll know I need to hit my... It's a signal. >> Can I ask you a question? >> Sure. I need to get out here and get some other materials, and then I'll let you ask a question. Yes. >> I'm a retired math and science teacher, and my big thing was learning styles. Does you're program address all the different learning styles? The auditory, physical, graphic? >> We don't do the six learning styles in that sense. 

We do talk about different ways people learn, but we didn't break it down into, I can't remember his name. We need one more learner here. Two learners. So now the learners are all set up. So if the learner opens their folder, and I have to admit, the learner needs a pen or a pencil. So hopefully you have them. If you don't have one, ask somebody if they have one that you can borrow. So if you're the learner, open up your folder. There should be a blank piece of paper inside, and you need to open it and put the folder, here, yes. We'll do the example. 

You should hold it between you and the scientist so they can't see what you're doing. >> Secret agent man. >> That's right. >> Like Battleship. >> You're going to be drawing something on this blank piece of paper. So that's your job. You're learning how to draw. Let's put it that way. You're learning how to draw something, but the important thing is that the scientist can't see what you're doing. Okay? Any questions? I don't want to get ahead of everybody. 

Now, the scientist has another folder. Inside here, which I can't show you, is a drawing. So when you get this, you open it up, make sure that your learner can't see it but you can see it, and your challenge, there you go, one per scientist. Let me give one. So your goal is to sit here and say draw this. Now you can't go like that. That's not fair. You can't draw it. You can only use words. You can't see what the learner is doing. 

And there is no conversation between the two of you. It's a one-way conversation. You just talk. Now, if you want to put in the context, this is like being in that 300-person lecture that you took at the university. One-way communication. So we want to see how good you are at conveying information, and we'll relate that to how people learn. Okay, any questions? Am I clear enough? I'll give you one here in a second. Okay, so as soon as you get it, if you have one you can start talking to your learner and tell him how to draw this item. >> Do I need a pen? >> You do need a pen, and I just happen to have one. >> Thank you. 

>> Just remember that I need to get it back. >> I'm not clear what I am to do. >> She's going to tell you what to do. >> She's going to tell you what to draw on here. You have to draw what she tells you to draw. >> Okay. [LIVELY CHATTER]  >> Okay, let's see how you did here. Oh, that's pretty impressive. So what did you do to get that? >> I told him to draw a light bulb. >> If you're done, you can look at what the person drew and talk about what made it easy, what made it hard. 

>> I said draw a light bulb without the base. >> Okay, light bulb. That's pretty good. People don't usually do, it'll be interesting to see. You can see they're working on it down there. That's not too bad either. Or compare theirs.  All right, so how'd you get this over here? >> That one started with a triangle. I thought that was the center. >> All right. 

That's why I want to talk about the challenges here in a second.  Okay, well I hate to stop everybody's fun, but we are supposed to be done shortly. Oh, yes, thank you. I forgot. Okay, if I can get everybody's attention back up here.  All right, I don't want you having so much fun. [LAUGHTER] Okay, we do this activity, I'm going to talk a little bit more about it, we actually do three rounds. We have three different versions. This is, again, lecture style. One-way communication. 

This is that traditional way, I just tell them all the stuff. The second one, the scientist can see what the learner is doing, but it's still one-way communication. And then the last time, it really is full communication. And of course, people at the end talk about how important it is to be able to say, wait, what did you mean by this? Did you really want me to do this? This whole idea of a discussion. This is why we think face-to-face interaction is important. So it gets across the whole idea of how people learn and how valuable conversation is. If you look at learning that goes on, if you want to get people from some sort of conception they have of topic, whatever it is, it's by getting them to talk about it, especially if you talk about it in a group so you have kind of a socialization going on. This is a key element to learning is having conversations, doing some discussion about what you're doing. And then the scientist who might not be totally enamored with this face-to-face but I'm willing to come because my friend came, by the time you finish this it's like yeah, face-to-face is the only way to go because if you think about what you're doing when you talk to people, here you're making your partner draw a physical thing, and you can say you got it or you didn't get it, but when you're trying to teach a scientific concept, what you're doing is drawing an image in their head. Your goal is for them to have the same image in their head as you have in your head. 

And the only way you can figure that out is by having a conversation with them. Ask them questions. I grew up in the planetarium field a lot. A big planetarium, big show, you go, oh, isn't that wonderful? Well, you have no idea what anybody learned out there. I actually got very involved with participatory planetariums where you have a discussion between the audience and the presenter. That's the way that you know learning is going on. So that's absolutely critical. What were some of the things that made it easier, and what are some of the things that made it harder? Yeah? >> I don't know what the middle thing is. >> Oh, you don't know what it is. I'll have to sit here and see if I can find, here's the yellow one. 

So here's what they had. I don't know how many did that, but a lot of people talk about a backwards C with a bent flagpole in the middle. It's hard compared to something like this where you say triangle. People know what a triangle is. So what this brings out, again, on how people learn, even though I don't like being interrupted, when discussion is going on it's that key element of learning that's going on. When you say triangle, people know what that is. So a key element of building on how people learn is using knowledge, or using vocabulary-- Okay everybody. Shh. [LAUGHTER] Hit them on the head. I'm the teacher staring down at these two people over here talking. 

[LAUGHTER] Sorry, if we had more time, I'd love to let the conversation go on. So it's this idea of using known vocabulary. That's great until you hit something like this and it's like, okay, what am I supposed to do with that? This one actually, relatively speaking, is typically much easier than, let's see if I can find the one, no that's not it. Who has a red one? I need a red one. Yes, there we go. Thank you. Well, it depends how you look at it. Does it go this way or this way? This one's easier? >> Yeah. >> That's interesting. So why is this one easier? >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Pyramid? I know pyramid. 

Now what did you do for this? >> Light bulb. >> Light bulb. Now here's another tool that the scientist thinks about. And, again, the goal is to build up a toolkit of things to use, then to go out and use them, practice them and so on. So light bulb, anybody else use something different? >> Parking meter. >> Parking meter. There we go. I should have a little tooth in here and then it would be time's up. Parking meter. Casper the ghost. 

Now, what happens when you do this? >> Nose. A platypus bill or a nose. >> Oh, a platypus bill. A nose. A lot of people say a thumb. We did the workshop this afternoon for graduate students and it typically was this direction and it was, as they said, that thing that hangs in the back of your mouth. [LAUGHTER] That worked pretty well actually. I was amazed at the number of people that did that and that's another one. So what do we call those? Analogies. So the use of analogies, this is probably the most powerful tool that we use in teaching in general, not just for scientists engaged with public audiences. 

We use analogies. We try and relate it to something they will know. Well, how do you know what they will know? How do you know that they knew what you used? What do you have to do? Have a discussion with them. You have to ask them questions because then you can get feedback to tell you whether they understood it or not. So when you do this for the third time, you really get an understanding of what it takes to get across information. >> With that one we got really good on the shapes. I oriented them left and right correctly but not up and down correctly. >> Yep, that's a problem. And we actually, sometimes people put their paper this way when they really want it this way. Sometimes they do, they get little images over on one side because nobody says this covers the whole page. 

If you're just telling me to draw something, does it cover the whole page? So you get into whole issues of how precise you need to be, you need to be thinking about what information you need to give, but more important than anything else is you need that feedback because you can never be totally precise. You can never be on top of all the issues for every person. So the conversation is really important. That's just an example of the kinds of things that are really important and build off how people learn. So this is a good example. When I say wave, what do you think of when I say wave? All right, the wave. [LAUGHTER] I didn't think about that. Seattle Seahawks wave and the wave, the royal wave. So that's fair enough. Of course, maybe if you're a physicist you might think of a sine wave. 

We actually have one drawing, I don't know if anybody had it out there that has kind of a nice sine wave. It's a lower amplitude sine wave but a sine wave. So if you know you're talking to a physicist, you're in great shape. Of course, there's the wave, and then there's another kind of wave. If you lived in California, you'd probably think of this wave and hope for that kind of wave all the time. Given the time we're at, this is a wonderful book called Fishless Fish. It's really great to illustrate this too. I'm going to skip that right now. So this is the goal. This is the challenge we have. 

I sit here and go, oh, I'm a flower, and everybody else thinks I'm, whoever knows what they think it is. And the goal, of course, and it's important to realize, this is the other challenge with people saying I want to make sure they understand it, and when they don't understand it, you get all frustrated. Well, people don't learn that way. You learn over time. You understand a little bit better. You still have some misconceptions about something. So it takes a number of experiences, not just necessarily the same experience with the same person. It's not you have to just hit them again and again. They have to go away, think about it. They have to have another experience someplace else, and then, of course, the ideal thing is that you've been able to make it so that everybody understands it. 

Now, another activity we do, and we're not going to do because we don't have enough time, so they've developed this toolkit of learning about how people learn, but now they have to facilitate that with visitors of the science center. Again, that's that school group over here, the grandparent with a grandchild, a family, two adults and two kids, a 12-year-old and a 4-year-old. That's an interesting group to try and have a conversation with. You won't ever have a conversation with all of them, but often you want to have something that you can give to a 4-year-old while you're having a conversation with the adult, an activity for the, so you really do think about these things. So we have things called talk to your neighbor, and it's a role playing activity where people pair up and they pull out of a paper bag, basically, different audiences. And one of them has to role play the twin 4-year-olds or the grocery clerk or the retired politician. That's an interesting group to try and talk to. [LAUGHTER] Whatever it is. But it gives them a chance to try that practice, again, within a comfortable environment. They don't have to go out and do it, but they get some practice, time to reflect, some more time to practice. 

They switch roles. They do it a few times. All important. All built upon what we know about how people learn. And, finally, I have to admit, what's really been great from our point of view, and I'm going to leave it at this and then answer questions, is we now have this cadre of people who come to our life science research weekend, to our polar science weekend, 200 people, 250 people that are trained, now we can have them involved with other things or if we need people who have the same skills of communication. So we run three science cafes around the Puget Sound area. I hadn't thought about it, this happens here every Wednesday night. We do three nights a month. So we're almost there. We just have to have a fourth site. 

Then we'd be almost equal to it. >> [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] >> Well, I have to go to Tacoma for one of them, Seattle for another, and Redmond for another. >> Right on the way. [LAUGHTER] >> So we have science cafes, and I have to admit, I have this fantasy in life, I do call it a fantasy, it's a dream but it's really a fantasy, and that is some day science will be as pervasive as sports. It's kind of like all right. You can imagine after school science, intramural science, a little pick-up science activity at the local playground. And I know we've made it when you have to rush home for Monday night science. So we have Friday night science. I don't know if that, we don't get millions of people at a time. Science cafes are becoming very popular, so at least we're starting a trend. 

The other thing we've been able to do is to go from having these big research weekends, we now have our scientist spotlight where 8 to 10 of these scientists come down every first Saturday of the month and they set up in our exhibit area and they just interact with the public for the day. We now have repeat visitors because they know they can come. It's like coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. They know they can come down on the first Saturday of every month, and they'll have some interesting, it's typically different. It's not like they know, oh, it's always going to be an astronomer or it's always going to be a geneticist or whatever. They'll be a whole range. So that's been real nice. And of course we keep on trying to figure out how to expand, and, finally, we have gotten the university to buy into this and have a husky weekend. It's the University of Washington Huskies. We want to call it a husky weekend, but they decided on Paws on Science to build off the dogs, as they say. 

And now we're trying, so how many people can we get to do this. We've been working really hard on getting the Washington State University to come and have a Washington State University weekend. They're over in eastern Washington so it's a lot more of an effort, but they're the Washington State Cougars. So instead of a husky we'd have a cougar weekend. And I have to admit, I said that to a group of people and they just started laughing and laughing. [LAUGHTER] It shows what I know about pop culture. Washington State Cougars are Washington State. It means nothing else. But it could be interesting to have a whole different clientele for a cougar weekend. [LAUGHTER] >> Where do we sign up? >> Yeah, right. 

And so we've actually gone and we've worked with NASA activities and so on. So the goal is really to build this, Monday night science is the vision. How do we take this group of scientists that we're working with, be able to convey current research? You guys do this really well here. Most science centers like us, we have one PhD on our staff. It's not me. One PhD and we're not science specialists. We're science communication specialists. So it's being able to bring in those science communicators is really important. So working with MDITR, which I don't remember, it's a chemistry or material science and technology center at the university with several partners. So building off of what we're doing, the goal, of course, would be to have activities every weekend if we could do it and many places. 

So, again, I come here and I'm just excited about the wealth of possibilities that you have to do something like this. And it's been a great adventure for us. And thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]