• Question: Could you explain further what you would do with the prize money and how it would benefit the human race?

    Asked by maddiiee to Alan, Caspar, Diana, Murray, Sarah on 17 Mar 2011 in Categories: . This question was also asked by jackbodd, geeeemolive, etman, vickytownsend, 08broadd, cridland1, kirstyrix, derp, fraz, garryhooper88, sunnybartley, xxsk83rg1rlxx, betthh, scaniakid, jcook, chl0e.
    • Photo: Alan Winfield

      Alan Winfield answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Well, as I said in my profile, I have become interested recently in something called community robotics. This means making simple low-cost robot gadgets that ordinary people can use to make their lives better. Later this year I will have some visitors from America, from the Create Lab in Pittsburgh, who have done some amazing community robotics projects and if I was to win Iā€™m a Scientist I would use the money to try out some of their ideas here in Bristol. Here is the Create Lab web pages so you can see what I mean: http://createlab.ri.cmu.edu/

      Do please let me know which of the Create Lab projects you like the best:-)

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Hiya Maddiiee,

      I would spend the prize money on my workshop. I’ve made a Cancer Research workshop to run in schools and science festivals. For example, last weekend I was doing it at the Dunbar Science Festival, here is a link to the news story: http://www.chem.ed.ac.uk/news_events/news_11.html

      The workshop is made of things I have borrowed from other scientists in my department and some freebies from Cancer Research UK. I set up a fake blood test and the kids make my samples and then test the fluorescence.

      I would use the prize money to get more materials for my workshop so that I could run it in more schools and science festivals.

      I would also like to make it into a downloadable resource for teachers so that they can do it themselves in the classroom.

      How would this benefit the human race? Well I want to teach people about cancer because most of the cancers in this country are caused by people smoking, drinking and sun tanning too much. These are avoidable things. Also we are short of scientists here, so I want to inspire more people into science – science is fun and useful, we need scientists in our society for lots of important things, but kids seem to think science is boring and not important at all šŸ™

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