Dr Alex Ball - Natural History Museum

Dr Alex Ball
Over the past 5 years I’ve been working on two different projects with a similar goal, to increase access to high performance microscopy.

The Hitachi STEM Education Outreach Programme launched in the UK in 2019 and is a collaboration between the Natural History Museum, The Royal Microscopical Society and The Institute for Research in Schools, supported by Hitachi High Technology and Oxford Instruments. Through this programme we loan portable SEMs to schools to support curiosity led research and STEM education, although practice has shown that with the right encouragement schools can be much more imaginative than this in their approach. Each loan lasts 5-6 weeks and the students are encouraged to learn through experimentation, trial and error to explore their projects over an extended period to maximise their opportunities for accidental learning. Students have the opportunity to present their research at one of the three IRIS summer conferences held across the UK.

In the five years since the programme launched, over 300 teachers and science technicians have been trained to use the SEMs and they have collectively supported over 800 student projects. Furthermore, over 12,000 students have used the programme at more than 120 schools across the UK. The programme has also supported outreach to over 3000 outreach participants at events supported by schools.

Make it Visible is a much more experimental project that seeks to investigate how visually impaired people might explore microscopical data. We use 3D printed models of enlarged specimens to introduce participants to the concepts of magnification and resolution and then invite them to explore enlarged examples of natural objects that extend beyond the resolution of conventional human vision. We
support this exploration process through the use of near-field communication chip-equipped cards which trigger audio descriptions of the objects from a smart speaker system called “Museum in a Box”. The cards include Braille, enlarged text and embossed 3D models and allow the users to trigger the correct audio file for each object, thus providing them with equivalent autonomy to anyone reading a coffee table book. The project has been developed with the assistance of PhD and MSc students at UCL and University of the Arts, London and students at Linden Lodge School, a specialist school for the blind in South-West London. This latter project highlights the importance of iterative co-design working with the end-users to address their specific and complex needs.