STEMNET Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network

We have the only student run pop-up museum in Scotland which has been a fantastic success so far. Essentially a selection of artefacts in a crate, it contains things which are chosen, researched and presented by my current undergraduate student mentoring group. The contents of the Pop-Up Museum vary according to the nature of the event that we “pop-up” at, for example we have done an archaeology one for the 50th anniversary of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow which contained archaeological objects.However Pop-Up Museum, on Saturday 11th June in the Hunterian Art Gallery, was part of the Science Festival programme so our “Medical Maladies” version contained scientific and medical instruments and human remains from the archaeology collection. An inspired selection by my colleague Shan Macdonald who led this event. Over the six hours that we were there we saw about 200 people, all of whom looked at every object, had a go with the interactive ones and asked loads of questions. The kids loved everything!

From a personal development view, and I know that my students will agree, all kinds of skills are required and brought into play for the Pop-Up Museum. My students, Rachael, Dave, Scott and Christina, are from Classics, Archaeology and History of Art and they have been presenting ethnographical, scientific and medical objects that they had never seen before and knew nothing about before they had done some research into them. I am also delighted that everyone has now signed up to be a STEM Ambassador which is another great opportunity to acquire and develop new skills and to tell everyone how cool STEM stuff is!We are now in the process of selecting some great objects from the Museum’s collections for our STEM Pop-Up Museum kits which will be good to go for academic year 2011-12. These will be taken into schools by a wide range of students from the University of Glasgow giving them, and the schools, an opportunity to create an original and interesting learning experience while promoting STEM. Dr Macaura's Blood Circulator has had amazing results on us all…