Tonia Thomas
University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.110.40a

Oxford Hands-On Science (OxHOS) is a student-run society in Oxford. We aim to spread our enthusiasm for science to children and their families by taking hands-on experiments drawn from a range of subject areas into schools and public venues, along with a group of student volunteers to assist in demonstrating them. As the co-president of OxHOS and a member of the society founding committee, I have used my DPhil experience in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics to engage children and families in basic physiology concepts and their importance in our everyday lives.

Being a first-generation university student who grew up in a small town in South Wales with no aspirations to study at Oxford, I am passionate about improving education and raising aspirations in disadvantaged areas of the UK. For this reason I was part of the OxHOS founding committee, which was established in 2015, and our ethos is to target low-performing state schools in remote areas of the country to encourage children to study science at GCSE and beyond. We ran our first official roadshow in the Summer of 2016, when we visited schools and public venues in Oxfordshire and South Wales, and returning to my home region with a group of Oxford researchers and experiments was incredibly rewarding.

2017 has seen our engagement grow by 70% as we visited 16 schools and six public venues in Oxfordshire, Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight. Reaching out to more remote, disadvantaged areas is our main priority, and this expansion wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of The Physiological Society. We’re grateful for their endorsement of a student-led project that is building success with each event held.
Last year we held public events in Oxford in collaboration with the National Association for Primary Education and Oxfordshire Science Festival, which involved street demonstrations of blood pressure and heart rate, and engaged young ‘scientists’ in determining how blood groups interact. Our Summer roadshow took us across the water to the Isle of Wight, after receiving a request from a school there through our website, and we taught children about digestive enzymes whilst making ‘poo’. This experiment also went down well at our public event at Winchester Science Centre, where it was set up next to their Colon Café!

Changing students’ view of science and hearing comments like ‘science is actually cool’ is something that drives us to keep expanding our outreach work, and reminds us that one of the most rewarding aspects of research is the ability we have to share it with the public.