'nough said 

Hey gang,
I think it might be easier to have actual discussions if we use a message board instead of LJ because the board keeps recent posts at the top instead of having to search through and find which LJ post has more comments than before.

I created a free board at:
http://sciencesquad.proboards50.com/

You should all be able to sign up, and I think I can give everyone admin access if they want it.

If you'd rather just use LJ, that's fine too, just thought the boards might make things easier.

-Ryan

Ok, I can't withstand a personal plea for help...

This project sounds amazing! What age group are we aiming for? I have some materials for middle school (grades 6-9) but very little for elementary. I can also contact the people at APS public outreach (my bosses from this summer) if we need advice or want to ask for support. I know they love this stuff as much as we do. The APS folk would probably also know some resources for good elementary science topics to explore, so that we can get an idea of good content and the kind of vocabulary we can use.

That's about it for now. Hooray for outreach!

An Idea:
Our short segments could focus on how a certain problem in science was figured out. So we could have our characters wondering what matter is made of, for example, and then come up with and do some of the famous experiments and end with discovering electrons and the nucleus. A bit of historical context, it shows how science really works, and the "story" IS the science, which I think is a big plus.

Hey folks,
I have been trying to think of ways that we can reach the most people possible with what we eventually do here (speaking of which, we still need to work on what our goals are). We have mentioned YouTube, which I think would be cool IF what we do is good enough that people will want to pass it on to their friends after seeing it.

As for archetypes that we might use (see my long post about strategies): Pirates and ninjas. No, I'm serious. We want something that people will voluntarily pass on to their friends. And everyone loves pirates and ninjas. I'm still serious (about the general idea at least).

Also, I have been thinking about media other than You Tube. Do we, or anyone we know, know how to use Flash? Picture a smash hit the magnitude of Homestar Runner, but with educational content.

OR, what about an educational webcomic? Sounds lame, but we would make it not-lame. And it's another type of medium that can quickly spread throughout the interwebs *if* it catches on (look at xkcd).


PS- Read about memes if you aren't familiar with the term. What (I believe) we want to do, is create memes.

This is a summary of the main points of a presentation made by Bob Rogers to the Mars Mission Architecture team back in '98 when they were trying to come up with a plan to get samples returned from mars. Bob Rogers is the founder of BRC Imagination Arts, a company that specializes in designing theme parks, museums, world's fair pavilions and the like. A lot of the advice carries over to our goal of getting the public engaged in science. I will try to tweak the details so that they apply to us.


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Ok, those are some of the points from the presentation. Not all are directly applicable, but I tried to pick stuff that we should at least think about. How much of a story can we tell? How much do we simplify (aka who is our target audience)? Things like that.

I figured we can use this as a place to start talking. We need to define what we want to do and what we are capable of doing first, then get down to the details.

Ok, discuss!

Hey, great idea setting up a place to organize. I don't have a lot of time to post right now, but this summer I got a packet of info about getting the public interested in space, and most of that info can apply to interest in science in general. I'll skim over it again soon and post the main points here. (I talked about it a bit in a long entry a few weeks back...)