Outreach activities

News:
Cristina: STFC Public Engagement fellowship. length 3 years started end of 2013.

Activities:
** Royal Society Summer Science exhibition: "The Higgs boson and beyond", more than 100 people from 18 UK institutes involved, 15,000 visitors and 35kGBP budget.
   Feedback was very positive, introduced/produced new demonstrations and new booklet (aiming to younger ages).

** Other festivals/outreach events include:
   - the British Science Festival, when we have events for general public, pre-16 and post-16
   - the Grantham Gravity Field Festival
   - the Manchester Science festival

** Cristina: Talks to local schools but also abroad (this month Cristina Brera Observatory in Milan)

** John: Spark chamber visits to schools (but that lapsed a bit last year as my grant expired - only 6 schools visited, compared to the usual 20 or so). But the grant has now been renewed.

** A film screening festival in the context of the university's "Arts and Science" Festival

** HISPARC [http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/physics/schools/intro-to-hispac-project-slides.pdf]:
  - our detector works well, after a lot of work during the summer
  - I have a RS partnership Grant with a muslim girl school in Birmingham
  - King Edwards School has a detector
  - 3 more local schools want to buy a detector
  so this is starting to fly and the IoP has granted their support and will include the HISPARC training into their teacher training programme

**  Cosmic ray telecope for schools
  - System based on Fermilab's Quarknet DAQ card. 
  - Attracted interest from many teachers but so far only three school have take up the offer (and then performed student projects with the apparatus).

** Pete is involved on the first particle physics Zooniverse project (citizen scientists), lead by Alan Barr (Oxford) and Andy Haas (New York).
  - Search for long lived neutral particle decays which are predicted in some models for rare decays of the Higgs.
  - Currently on beta test, should  go live in the next month or so.
    [ see https://www.zooniverse.org/ and https://indico.cern.ch/event/290830/ ]

**  On the EU front
    - "Balloons across Europe" project (led by Stockholm) was well reviewed (mark of 13.5/15) but was not funded in this first round.
    - Considering the possibility in applying for another grant in the context of Horizon 2020

** Other activities: Continuing Professional Development on particle physics for teachers with IoP and Philip Allen organisations, development of e-learning resources in collaboration with CERN
 

Topics needed attention:
1) Some space is needed for storing our outreach material (stands, demonstrations, etc)
2) Potentially, larger involvement of post-grad students in the Spark Chamber demonstration with the associated talk. This could be much more effective in connecting with the young students in schools.