Outreach and Education
After significantly fewer outreach events in 2020, the Centre was delighted to recommence and expand many of ACEMS’ outreach activities in 2021, either in person or virtually.
ACEMS focused on school and student engagement, the general public, and the mathematical sciences research community as outlined below.
An online meeting of the Centre’s outreach team: (top) Administration Officer Victoria Edwards, Associate Investigator Nigel Bean, (middle) Outreach Officer Anita Ponsaing, Associate Investigator Anthony Mays, Deputy Director of Outreach Tim Garoni, (bottom) Outreach Business Officer Rosanna Verde, and Chief Operating Officer Emily Duane.
OUTREACH TO SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS
MathsCraft: Doing Maths Like a Research Mathematician
MathsCraft: Doing Maths like a Research Mathematician is one of ACEMS’ flagship outreach programs. It offers students in Years 5-10 the opportunity to engage in authentic mathematical problem-solving, using ideas and processes with which they are already familiar. In the process, the joy of doing mathematics is nurtured and this drives interest in, and provides a purpose for, learning new mathematical knowledge and skills.
Since 2015, the Centre has run many student workshops as well as teacher professional development workshops, including an annual five-day immersive residential workshop that brings together teachers and mathematicians to do maths and discuss pedagogy. After 2020 saw many events cancelled or postponed, thankfully MathsCraft activities recommenced in 2021. While travel restrictions meant in-person events were only held in South Australia, the single-day professional development workshops were able to be modified to an online format, and so the MathsCraft program expanded. Workshops were run by ACEMS Affiliate Member Anthony Harradine of Prince Alfred College, Adelaide, and ACEMS Outreach Officer Anita Ponsaing.
After the 2019 pilot of the newly-developed MathsCraft Curriculum, the full launch of the Curriculum was delayed until 2021 to give teachers the time to manage online and hybrid teaching. The 2021 launch was very successful with 17 teachers subscribed to the MathsCraft curriculum in 2021, delivering it to approximately 485 students across multiple Australian states. Subscriptions to the MathsCraft Curriculum are expected to grow in future years and beyond ACEMS.
Read more about 2021 MathsCraft activities, including the five-day immersive residential workshop, here.
| MathsCraft Curriculum | 17 teachers delivering it to approximately 485 students across Australia |
| MathsCraft Teacher Professional Development Sessions | 20 sessions reaching nearly 600 teachers |
| Five-Day Residential MathsCraft Professional Development workshop for mathematics teachers | 18 teachers |
ACEMS MathsCraft teacher professional development sessions.
ACEMS’ five-day residential MathsCraft professional development workshop for mathematics teachers.
QUT Young Accelerators Event
ACEMS PhD Student Katie Buchhorn was a guest speaker at the QUT Young Accelerators Event on 25 June 2021. Around 100 students from Brisbane State High School came to QUT to hear from a range of speakers supporting the next generation of STEM leaders through creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
ACEMS CI Kerrie Mengersen tweeted about the event: “Our PhD stats student @katiebuchhorn inspires a silent room of about 100 engrossed high school maths students about the wonder of maths&stats, seen through her book for kids and their parents. Wonderful!”
ACEMS PhD Student Katie Buchhorn speaking at the QUT Young Accelerators Event in June 2021.
Queensland Association of Mathematics Teachers annual conference
ACEMS had a trade stall at the two-day QAMT state conference at Southport School in June 2021. ACEMS PhD Student Katie Buchhorn spent the two days engaged with mathematics teachers from across the state, showcasing the range of ACEMS outreach activities, including MathsCraft, the National Science Quiz, her book Wondrous Worlds, and Virtual Reef Diver.
The Santos Science Experience, University of Adelaide
ACEMS AI John Maclean helped organise the Santos Science Experience at the University of Adelaide, an interactive event for around 60 local Year 9-10 students from 7-9 December 2021. The mathematical part of the Experience was the "Rational Tangles" activity, which ACEMS Outreach Officer Anita Ponsaing and ACEMS Masters student Christina Tait helped to run. The activity got the kids up and learning that maths can be found in anything, even knots in ropes!
School Visit to Kelvin Grove State College
ACEMS AI Leah South accepted an invitation to speak to the "Women in STEM" Group at Kelvin Grove State College in October 2021, where she presented to high school students in Years 10-12.
Outreach to the general public
The National Science Quiz – a virtual success!
ACEMS had planned to relaunch the National Science Quiz (NSQ) as a televised event in mid-2020, but it was postponed until 2021 due to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. Fast-forward to August 2021 and just three days before the NSQ was to be relaunched at Melbourne’s Federation Square in front of a live audience and recorded for broadcast during National Science Week, the event was cancelled due to another snap lockdown.
ACEMS NSQ organisers – Outreach Business Officer Rosanna Verde, Deputy Director of Outreach Tim Garoni and Chief Operating Officer Emily Duane – quickly pivoted the format to a fully virtual event where panellists participated from home and were edited to become two teams at virtual panels. Long-term Quiz supporter ABC’s Charlie Pickering returned to host the NSQ with six of Australia’s best scientists and science communicators: Jared Cole, Alanta Colley, Norman Do, Alan Duffy, Jen Martin and Catriona Nguyen-Robertson.
You can read more about this amazing event here.
Women in Maths Day Video Campaign
For the third year in a row, ACEMS led a video message campaign featuring women from around Australia as part of its 2021 Women in Maths Day celebrations. The campaign also included a special video from men in our Centre.
ACEMS Public Lecture Series
In 2021, the Centre’s public lectures continued as a successful virtual series, available to the general public as well as the broader mathematical sciences community. These live, online public lectures were held around lunchtime and attracted a much wider and larger audience than when held in person at the individual nodes. Moreover, the lectures were recorded and made available on the ACEMS website afterwards, ensuring those who could not attend the lunchtime lecture could watch it later. For more information on the ACEMS Public Lecture Series, read the full story here.
ACEMS National Science Week Great Barrier Reef Citizen Science Challenge
During National Science Week, 13 - 22 August, ACEMS ran the “Virtual Reef Diver” citizen science challenge, encouraging individuals and teams to learn about and classify as many reef images as they could. This citizen science project helps reef scientists to improve coral reef monitoring, modelling, and predictions of reef health. Prizes were awarded to the best contributors, including a first prize of a five-day trip to Cairns, complete with guided eco-tours of the Great Barrier Reef.
On 10 September 2021, ACEMS met and congratulated some of the citizen scientists who had undertaken the challenge, with awards presented by Queensland Chief Scientist, Hugh Possingham. Hugh gave a short talk about his own experiences around reef science, the importance of science literacy in the community, combined with a future focus around reef protection with scientists and citizen scientists working together. ACEMS CI Kerrie Mengersen also spoke about the research enabled by the citizen science project, and the use of data science in reef science.
The event was attended online by multiple schools from around Australia, participants and prize winners. It was organised by ACEMS members Angela Dahlke, Kerrie Mengersen, Katie Buchhorn, Jack Ford Morgan, Rosanna Verde, Edgar Santos-Fernandez, and Kris Mann.
For more information on these activities, read the full story in the ACEMS-AIMS partnership update.
Overview of ACEMS National Science Week 2021 Great Barrier Reef Event Series & Challenge
ACEMS National Science Week Citizen Science Challenge summary of participation and contributions.
Other Public Talks
In addition to the Centre’s Public Lecture Series, Centre members delivered 14 presentations that were open to the public to attend or delivered to a virtual audience.
| Members Involved | Topic | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Katie Buchhorn | How Mathematics helps humankind | Brisbane |
| Katie Buchhorn, Dianne Cook, Tom Honeyman, Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi & Dan Simpson | Open-source research software panel discussion | Virtual |
| Susanna Cramb | Bayesian multivariate models and maps: a spatial odyssey | Virtual |
| Susanna Cramb | Developing spatial estimates: the good, the bad and the data | Virtual |
| Susanna Cramb | The Queensland Injury Atlas | Brisbane |
| Nial Friel | A short overview of stochastic block models with application to the assessment of competitive balance in the English premier league | Virtual |
| Mark Harding | Monitoring the nation's pulse: the what, who, how, and why of the Australian Census | Virtual |
| Wei Huang | Estimating the covariance of fragmented and other related types of functional data | Online |
| Rob Hyndman | Forecasting elements that stand the test of time | Virtual |
| Kerrie Mengersen | Data is the new 'gold' for the 21st Century | Brisbane |
| Kerrie Mengersen | Deriving insights from new data sources | Virtual |
| Kerrie Mengersen | The rise and rise of data science centres and institutes | Virtual |
| Linda Tan | Efficient data augmentation techniques for state space models | Virtual |
| Matt Wand | Statistical methodology development and software dissemination | Sydney |
Outreach to the mathematical sciences research community
2021 International Women in Mathematics Day
International Women in Mathematics Day once again allowed ACEMS to showcase so many amazing women in our Centre and from around Australia.
The day is celebrated annually on 12 May, the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman ever to win the top award in mathematics, the Fields Medal. Maryam passed away in 2017 at the age of 40 from breast cancer.
After having to do everything virtually in 2020, the Centre was delighted to lead multiple in-person and online events this year. For more information on the various events, read the full story here.
rOpenSci Coworking and Office Hours, online – October – December 2021
The collaborative software development group rOpenSci runs online Social Coworking and Office Hours on a regular basis, allowing those who want support with their work in R to work with others and ask questions of experts. AI Nick Tierney helped host these co-working and office hours events between October – December 2021.
R-Ladies Colombo
In 2020, ACEMS AIs and former PhD students Priyanga Dilini Talagala and Thiyanga Talagala founded R-Ladies Colombo, the Sri Lanka chapter of R-Ladies Global, an organisation that promotes diversity in the R community worldwide. The group meets in person or virtually, including five events in 2021, to learn about the R programming language, algorithms and advanced tools.
Two of the 2021 R-Ladies Colombo events organised by ACEMS AIs and former PhD students Priyanga Dilini Talagala and Thiyanga Talagala.
Mentoring, technical, and equity and diversity seminar presentations
The following 14 talks were delivered as part of the Centre’s mentoring and technical talk series, and equity and diversity awareness campaign.
| Presenter/s | Title |
|---|---|
| Ruth Baker | Quantifying the effect of electric fields on single cell motility |
| John Barletta | Supporting each other and overcoming challenges in uncertain times |
| Andrea Bertazzi | Euler approximation schemes for Piecewise deterministic Markov processes |
| Joris Bierkens | Spectral theory and asymptotic variance of piecewise deterministic samplers |
| Katie Buchhorn | Working in R smarter, faster and more securely |
| Emma Burrows | A vision for an academic system where everyone's talent is recognised |
| Laura Cartwright | Emulation of Lagrangian particle dispersion model sensitivities using a convolutional variational autoencoder |
| Francesca Crucinio | A particle method for Fredholm Integral Equations of the First Kind |
| Rebecca Killick | Tackling global issues: change |
| Antonietta Mira | Intrinsic dimensions |
| Catarina Moreira and Chun Ouyang | Explainable analytics for "black-box" machine intelligence |
| Nick Tierney | Greta: simple and scalable statistical modelling in R |
| Orania Tokatlidis | Mental health essentials for ACEMS researchers and graduate research students |
| Yuling Yao | Bayesian hierarchical stacking: all models are wrong, but some are somewhere useful |