For my first co-op position back in 2018, I worked at Science World in Vancouver as a Science Facilitator. As someone interested in education and science communication, this was an incredibly exciting opportunity for me.
Overall, the experience lived up to the expectation. Some of the cool things that I was able to do includes:
- Performing science demo shows on center stage
- Playing Jenga with 10 foot tall towers made out of KEVA blocks
- Watching movies daily on a 5-storey tall Omnimax theater screen
- Joining in Science World hosted events including TRIUMF conferences, music concerts, and charity fundraisers
- Holding the lightsaber prop used in the original Star Wars films
- Handling stickbugs, leopard geckos, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, and snakes
- Traveling to local schools and held after-school science programs
Above all, the thing that I am most proud of is creating a coding workshop.
For the Science Facilitator co-ops at Science World, as a final project you are encouraged to come up with your own idea. Some of the suggestions include improving an exhibit, creating a demo, filming videos for center stage, and helping out a gallery curator with their projects.
My favorite gallery at Science World has always been the Tinkering gallery. As a first-year engineering student, this gallery represented the things that got me interested in engineering in the first place: creativity, building, and discovery. If I was ever scheduled in the Tinkering gallery during a slow day, I would build intricate towers out of KEVA blocks then encourage kids to knock it over (so I can get them to help clean up).
So I knew right away that I wanted to work on a project related to this gallery. I quickly got in contact with the curator at the time, Kat, and she gave me a list of things that she was currently working on. One such item was an activity based around these very cool line-following robots: Ozobots.
Ozobots
Kat’s plan was to have these as a regular activity available for visitors to play around with. She needed help with testing various markers and surfaces to help run the activity. Ideally we would want to save paper so we wanted to see if whiteboards were feasible.
As such, I got to play around with these Ozobots a lot. I learned everything that I could about them: calibration methods, cleaning, online 3rd party apps, and some secret tricks. I documented everything so that by the end of it I was able to create an official unofficial guide for Science World staff to reference.
With this in my back pocket, I wanted to use my new expertise to create something that would require this expertise.
One of my favorite things to do on the job was holding workshops. They’re 1-2 hour sessions where you get to be a teacher! The workshops at Science World are very expertly designed. There are a lot of technical aspects that I did not have the expertise for:
- What is the age range for my workshop?
- What are the learning outcomes?
- Where does this fit within the BC curriculum?
- What safety aspects are there to consider?
It was going to be a lot more planning and research than I initially thought. Luckily, I had the perfect person to help on my team. An aspiring teacher completing a work placement: Natalie. From her teaching experience and my Ozobot expertise, we were able to hash out a workshop after a few hours: the Ozobot dance-off.
It was a wonderful idea! Aside from their line-following capabilities, you can program various sequences into the robot and have it run through these commands. You can control movement as well as LED color for some flashy displays. And the best part: everyone wins! There is no losing since every dance will be unique and fun in its own way. Students will be able to get the most out of the workshop by learning how to code: using loops, if statements, and sequential operations to do something really cool.
When it came time to pitch the workshop to the program directors at Science World, they were all incredibly enthusiastic about the idea. Science World has been working towards creating a larger coding-based workshop catalogue and the Ozobot dance-off was going to be the first step in this direction.
Conclusion
My co-op term ended before I got the chance to see the workshop in action. I was able to teach it to all of the other staff before I left and they all had a great time.
I heard from them much later that it was run a bunch of times over the summer to great success. I was ecstatic to hear that something that I had worked so hard on has made a lasting impact on some of the hundreds of thousands of children all around BC that Science World reaches every year.
This ended up being the perfect conclusion to a wonderful co-op term. I would like to thank Science World for the opportunity and I would highly recommend working there.
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joey gaffney 