Kara M Lynch edited sectionImpact_of_tha.tex  over 7 years ago

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An important aspect of the workshops, and one that has been picked up on by teachers, is that they are led by current physics undergraduate students, and that each 3-student delivery team has at least one female member. This allows the students to act as role models, and to informally talk with pupils during the event about their experience of studying physics, and about physics careers.\\  In April 2016, student ambassadors took three of the robots to Legoland in Intu Trafford Centre (a shopping centre in Greater Manchester, the second largest by retail size in the UK) as part of the University’s ScienceX weekend event, aimed at taking typical university science festival activities to a more general audience, see Figure \ref{fig:legoland}. \ref{fig:students}(b).  An estimated 10,000 people were engaged by all activities over the 2-day event, with around 200 taking part in the LEGO\textregistered{} activity, mostly families with young children. Ironically, given the original remit of the project, we were asked to avoid a nuclear theme in case any customers mistakenly believed the “radioactive” LEGO\textregistered{} blocks transported by the robots to be genuine radioactive material. The robots, therefore, remained structurally the same but were rebranded as Mars exploration vehicles. \\ This theme has carried through to a revised workshop, based around the exploration and colonisation of Mars, which in July/August 2016 was delivered to 5 classes and a total of 145 students between Year 7 and Year 9. It was found that the programming aspect of the workshop was easy to translate to a different context – as with nuclear target handling ISOLDE, the space travel scenario is an example of using robots to carry out scientific research in extreme environments. \\  A second revision over summer 2016 simplified the robots, removing the grabbing claw to make it easier for workshop groups to add the various sensors and to allow for a range of different programming challenges. The workshop is currently being offered to schools, and can be delivered as either nuclear or space themed as requested. A new group of undergraduate ambassadors will be trained in 2017.\\  The original prototype robot – Clarence, see Figure \ref{fig:clarence} \ref{fig:robot}(a)  – was brought to the annual ISOLDE workshop and users meeting in December 2015, see Figure \ref{fig:isoldeWS:maria} \ref{fig:robot}(c)  by two of the undergraduate ambassadors (including the designer) presented in Figure \ref{fig:isoldeWS:students} \ref{fig:robot}(b)  and is now on display in the ISOLDE visitors’ centre.\\ %  %  %