Promoting the science and engineering of timber to children through online video and games

Dr Dan RIDLEY-ELLIS, Centre for Timber Engineering, Edinburgh Napier University

Summary

Using new media approaches to engage with a hard-to-reach audience. These experimental (and inexpensive!) initiatives are fully detailed in these papers:

• Daniel Ridley-Ellis "Promoting the science and engineering of timber to children". Proceedings of the 10th World Conference on Timber Engineering, Miyazaki 2008
• Nuffield Science Bursary Project Report "Engagement with the Wood Chain: Increasing Knowledge and Enthusiasm in Secondary School Pupils for the Forest and Timber Industries" (Annie McKirdy)

Objectives: “The creative brief”

A key aspect of this was involvement of young people themselves in the whole process, mainly from summer placements for three high school students (aged 16-17) organised through the Nuffield Science Bursary scheme. The students were asked to help:
►Understand what influences career choice for young people
►Discover and understand misconceptions about the forest and timber industries
►Decide on the best media with which to tackle these misconceptions
►Design, create and evaluate media

The involvement of the high school students proved so fruitful that the original plan to commission work from professionals based on what the students had produced was abandoned.
►Do-it-yourself’ approach a fraction of the cost of professional work (estimated to be between 5 to 10%)
►Children seemed to relate better to the students’ work than they did to the more slick ‘corporate’ productions.
►It also allowed greater creative freedom and imposed fewer restrictions on how the work could be distributed and built-upon.

MEDIA

• DVD: Short videos can be used in many ways to support engagement activity. They can be used to illustrate face-to-face presentations, and, if entertaining enough, be watched by children through their own choice. DVDs are cheap to duplicate and the equipment required to view them is now almost ubiquitous. They still have a high perceived value, and are therefore good items to give away at events or through the post.
  ►Videos can be easily made with affordable consumer level equipment and software. They are best made with the help of young people from the target audience, not least because it helps ensure the language used is understandable.
  ►Twenty thousand copies of the DVD were produced in November 2007. Informal feedback suggests they are useful in teaching different parts of the curriculum. Feedback from industry has been positive and it is hoped that production of more copies can be funded.
   
• VIDEO STREAMING ON THE INTERNET: Video streaming services such as Google video and YouTube are an excellent way of maximising the audience of videos. As well as hosting the file, they allow videos to be easily embedded in to other websites and for captions to be added. These services allow users to rate and comment on videos, but most allow this to be disabled if this is not desired.
  ►The four most popular videos (‘The chemistry of wood’, ‘Using video in the classroom’, ‘Strength and stiffness’ and ‘Measuring stiffness with sound’) each receive an average of about two views per day. Statistics suggest that for every 15 views a video is downloaded so that it can viewed offline.
  ►Some networks block video streaming services and they are therefore not ideal as a mechanism of getting information into schools. For this reason, videos were also made available on a website in an alternative format.
   
• ONLINE GAMES
  Online games, and downloadable games for portable devices, are hugely popular among children and young adults. Many companies use them to advertise products, and their potential as joint promotional and dissemination tools is enormous.
  ►The first game to be created for the firrs website was a card game based on wood properties called ‘Timber Trumps’. The game, which was created in Adobe Flash, is a variation on a type of card game ‘Top Trumps’
  ►To be successful, games need to be:
       •    Designed creatively and imaginatively (although there are plenty of existing game types that can be adapted);
       •    Playable and entertaining
       •    Designed with input from the target game players (audience)
       •    Have the educational message embedded within the game (most online gamers come to a website to play a game, but will not look at the rest of the site: it is important to include the message within the game itself)

  Their creation is not necessarily an expensive process, but it is cheaper if in-house expertise can be used rather than a contractor. Fortunately, most online games use the same technologies as computer aided learning (Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Java etc).
  ►The students who play-tested Timber Trumps helped submit the game to the games website of Channel 4, one of the main UK television broadcasters. The game was surprisingly successful and had been viewed 1800 times within 24 hours of appearing on the Channel 4 website. Users of the channel 4 website can award a score to a game and it rose as high as two in the overall rankings.

Things to consider

• There are several ways of licensing materials internationally that allow people the freedom to share, but that also impose certain restrictions to protect the materials from misuse. One example of these ‘copyleft’ schemes that is becoming popular for creative works is Creative Commons. Most of the engagement materials created under the firrs project have been given a Creative Commons license that allows non-commercial use, so long as the work remains unaltered and is attributed to the original creators.