Outreach and Education

Designing Darwin Competition Winners announced: The winners of the 2008 'Designing Darwin' competition were announced at the Three Societies Conference on 5 July. This prize was awarded in three age categories for original designs that best illustrate the significance of Charles Darwin's birth bicentenary and the 150th birthday of his most famous work, On the Origin of Species in 2009. [See the winning entries].

Death and the City: our latest schools project, a performance piece which tasks the audience with trying to deal with an outbreak of the plague in 1630s York, was performed at the 2007 BA Festival of Science. The script and further materials are now available online.  More about Death and the City...

Image competition: the winner and runner-up in our visual image competition were announced at the BSHS Annual Conference in Manchester at the end of June. Download the images, and read the successful entrants' commentaries, here. 

Object Stories: our pilot project to create autobiographies for scientific objects was also discussed at the Annual Conference, with a session in which participants generated object stories of their own.  Find out more about the project, and read recent Object Stories, here...

We present The Bone Trail: a schools project, aimed at Key Stage 3, covering the history of comparative anatomy, geology, and palaeontology, and designed to encourage thinking skills and cross-disciplinary connections.  The downloadable resource packs include commentary on the project, teachers' notes and student worksheets.  More about the Bone Trail...

The Outreach and Education Committee coordinates and directs the Society's efforts to promote the understanding of the history of science, technology and medicine in a wide range of educational contexts, both formal and informal. 

The committee was founded in July 2005, and replaces the former Education Section committee.  Its members represent the interests of those who work in education, in museums, and in science communication, and also practising and retired scientists who are interested in the history of their disciplines. 

Our planned work currently includes

• preparing materials of interest to general audiences for publication in the BSHS newsletter Viewpoint and online;
• collecting and sharing ideas for use in a variety of educational contexts, online, in sessions at the BSHS Annual Conference, and in collaboration with curriculum development bodies;
• liaising with museums, libraries, archives and galleries to assist in the development and advertisement of exhibitions about the history of the sciences, technology and medicine;
• strengthening connections with science communities and with representatives of the media;
• hosting activities designed for a variety of non-academic audiences. 

To contact the committee, to find out more about current projects or to discuss new suggestions, email outreach@bshs.org.uk. 

The content of the Humanity in School Science resource, produced by the former BSHS Education Section, has been preserved and is available for download here. 

Humanity in School Science (pdf)

Please note that this resource was created in 2001, and some links and listed sources may be out of date.  New material will be released by the Outreach and Education Committee over the coming months. 

Education Forum was the journal of the former BSHS Education Section.  An archive of back issues is available from this site.  Education Forum's important role of providing book and media reviews, conference reports and discussion materials to a mostly schools-level educational audience, will be continued via the relaunched BSHS newsletter Viewpoint, and in other materials developed by the Outreach and Education Committee.