Audio Transcript

[00:00:00]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:18]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Glad to have you again for another chat around science and STEM and all that sort of thing. This week we’re hanging out with a very good friend of mine, Heather Catchpole, who is the Head of Content and the co-founder of Refraction Media, which is a STEM specialist media company, which since 2013 has been helping kids all over Australia and beyond understanding that kids can truly create a smarter future. It’s really, really cool.

[00:00:48]
Ben Newsome: Heather has worked for over a decade as an editor, she’s been a science news journalist and a producer at the ABC, Cosmos and the CSIRO. Through Refraction Media, she has distributed over 1.75 million magazines to students right across USA, Australia and New Zealand through the Careers with STEM brand. In 2015, the company was awarded as Publish Australia’s best small publisher and was twice shortlisted as the best startup in the Telstra Business Awards.

[00:01:18]
Ben Newsome: She has amazing credibility and she is truly about helping kids understand STEM in many, many ways. In this chat, we talk about Careers with STEM and all the different pathways that are available and some of the strange stories that have come up through her role as a specialist science news journalist. So, let’s get right into it.

[00:01:27]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S and click 100 free experiments.

[00:01:45]
Ben Newsome: Heather, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:47]
Heather Catchpole: Thanks Ben, great to be here.

[00:01:48]
Ben Newsome: It’s funny how you say that and it is great to be here, actually we were just hanging out only yesterday.

[00:01:54]
Heather Catchpole: We actually caught up in real life for the first time in a couple of years. It’s been awesome.

[00:01:58]
Ben Newsome: Oh no, it’s so strange. That’s just not a 2020 thing. Just you and I have just been doing so many things and it just happened to be that this year was the year we were going to cross paths again.

[00:02:10]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, absolutely. What a year.

[00:02:12]
Ben Newsome: Oh absolutely. Hey look Heather, some people may not have met you before. So Heather, what do you get up to?

[00:02:17]
Heather Catchpole: So, I’ve been around in science and just a big fan of science for many, many years. As you know I did do some fun science circus stuff, but my true love’s always been in writing about science and communicating science. For about the last seven years, I’ve had a business called Refraction Media. We started off helping people who had very complicated science to explain it to the everyday person. But as we continued to work in there, we just found that there was a really big gap in what people were doing with their careers, not just in science, but in technology and engineering, and the kind of stuff that they were learning, not just at school, but just in our everyday environment.

[00:03:00]
Heather Catchpole: Some of the jobs that we do nowadays are so complicated. It’s not just building a bridge, right? It’s building an optimised truck network to get gear from China to your Christmas tree. The jobs out there are pretty complicated. There are people trying to invent quantum computers. Even when we shop, you think about the data that we use when we shop and the amount of information that might go into, say, a rewards programme. There is a lot of data in there, a lot of people crunching the numbers trying to understand what’s going on. So we found that there was this gap in knowledge happening there. And that led us to start Careers with STEM magazine. It’s a magazine, a website, videos, a whole bunch of things, which I think you might have had Karen talking about before. So yeah, Careers with STEM has really gone from strength to strength in the last couple of years.

[00:03:52]
Ben Newsome: Oh, it’s really good reading and seriously it genuinely is. What I love about this type of thing is that STEM is out in the media all the time, but it is so diverse and so interesting to hear about what people do and more importantly how they get there. Looking back over this time and you’ve been doing this for quite a while, you must have had some interesting guests.

[00:04:14]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, absolutely. Look, that’s one of my favourite things about working in this area is you just meet awesome people. So one of the recent profilees we had, Shan Shan, she was doing a degree, didn’t really know what to write her thesis on, just a problem that people have when they come up in life. And she saw someone walking around with an oxygen tank, literally connected to her, had to walk around with this oxygen tank all day long. It’s one of these problems that not a few people have it, but it’s just life-changing.

[00:04:44]
Heather Catchpole: So she came up with this amazing thing you can put it in your pocket now and actually gives you the oxygen you need if you have any kind of breathing issue. So she’s come at science from an industrial design sort of background. It’s just really cool to meet people like that. I don’t know how old she is, but she looks like she’s 22 or something. So, just really amazing to see the people who are working on problem-solving in science.

[00:05:09]
Ben Newsome: Just think, imagine if you have mobility issues, trying to lug around an oxygen tank.

[00:05:15]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, absolutely. My granddad did and I remember it was just such a hassle for him to go out that he didn’t really want to go out. So this is what I love about science and technology is it’s world-changing at a personal level, but it’s also literally world-changing at a world level. All of the problems we’ve been dealing with this year, COVID, climate change, overpopulation, pollution, they all have their roots in STEM in some way. So, you’re literally working for the greater good by working to promote the stuff that people do in STEM.

[00:05:50]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. And considering what you do, and naturally you’d cross paths with a lot of schools and students and all these different ways. As a whole, do students have an actual idea of what they could do after a degree? Obviously, as we go through high school or even primary, we hear about going to university or college and studying ‘the thing’. We study the thing, and then at the end of it, especially in your last year, I know I did, you go, ‘Now what? I’m about to graduate, now what? Maybe I should have done some more planning.’

[00:06:27]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, look, surprisingly, students are still really influenced by their parents mostly, and then their teachers secondarily, around what to do. If the parents are really pushing for law, or if the parents work in a shop, or if they work in the police force, the kids just kind of model their careers on what they see around them. There’s this really great programme in the Hunter to get STEM across a whole bunch of schools. It’s the CASE network, C-A-S-E. Check out their website, the stuff they do is phenomenal. They just started doing this simple STEM programme in the mornings where they got kids together and they just did numeracy and literacy activities. But they made them all STEM related and some of them linked to some of the Careers with STEM stories that we’ve been doing.

[00:07:13]
Heather Catchpole: Now I went and talked to those kids, and I talked to the kids in Year 10 and I said, what careers are you interested in, what kind of things do you want to do? And they were like, work in a bakery, work in the police force. I then talked to the Year 7 kids who had been doing this programme and I was like, what kind of careers do you want to do? And they were like, I think I want to get into cryptography, or I’m really interested in web development. And I was just like, wow, what a change. Just see that, same school, over just a couple of years. We definitely need both, don’t get me wrong, we totally need bakers.

[00:07:44]
Ben Newsome: Oh, we need bakers. I support every baker out there, trust me.

[00:07:48]
Heather Catchpole: Absolutely. But there’s just the employment opportunities as people keep banging on, and I’m sure your audience have heard, STEM jobs are just growing twice as fast as other jobs. So there’s just a huge opportunity there. And it’s really cool in a regional area to see the kids going, yeah, it’s a matter of fact that we’re just going to hop into these complex STEM areas and you can just see the changing confidence there.

[00:08:15]
Ben Newsome: I actually really love that because working with regional areas, I mean I’m a regional kid. The old saying, I’m going to mess this up, but it’s kind of like, you become what you see type thing. And unless you’ve got it in front of you, let’s be honest, what Year 7 kid is going to know cryptography? They might have heard of forensic science, but what could you actually do with that? Do you see much of a difference between metropolitan and regional kids considering that we’re so connected these days with the internet and publications like yourself? Is there still that divide that exists?

[00:08:52]
Heather Catchpole: I think the divide is between well-funded schools and not well-funded schools. Possibly there are more not well-funded schools in regional areas, but I think the difference between a school that has a careers advisor and a STEM programme coordinator and a massive library full of 3D printing and awesome gear, it’s just different in opportunity there.

[00:09:20]
Heather Catchpole: However, I think I might have chatted with you after I did a hackathon with ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation recently, and they got kids all around Australia to hack different problems. It was actually won by this team of students in Oatlands, Tasmania, who came up with a really cool way to harness the energy from ocean waves to power remote communities. So I’m like, maybe that’s something that only Oatlands would have thought of, right?

[00:09:52]
Heather Catchpole: It didn’t matter that they didn’t have a 3D printer to make their prototype of their project. They were just like, we know that something like this can help a remote community because you can just transform that. So I do think that there’s a huge untapped resource in getting that diversity and getting kids of all sorts into this problem-solving space.

[00:10:11]
Ben Newsome: I love the idea of a hackathon because kids jumping into a real problem and developing ideas, there are a few different versions of this that you see around the place. I would love to see industry jump on board even more with this. Because it’d be so cool that you’ve got this little Petri dish, a beaker, an accelerator, so to speak. You’ve got students who are really keen to try and solve a thing, but often are ignored because they’re still in high school and they haven’t got the job that does the solving. It’d be really cool to see students actually creating those little innovative projects because they’ve got no fear at this point. There’s nothing to lose. Do you see anything like that around?

[00:10:50]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, look, this is so true. Give kids some space to solve a problem in the way that they want to, and it’s pretty amazing. There are some really cool programmes that do this already. The Tech Girls are Superheroes program, which literally gives you one kid is a business manager, the other one is the marketing manager, the other one is the technology consultant. So they get a mix of people. I think this is the great thing about hackathons and also about some of the STEM programmes in schools. There are some teachers doing some extraordinary stuff, just cross-disciplinary projects. And it’s just so cool to see that come together and see arts and STEM working together and just see the way that you can develop that cross-disciplinary stuff.

[00:11:36]
Heather Catchpole: This is a massive passion of mine and one of my favourite projects over in the US was a project that got kids working who were doing physics and tech and got them together and basically did some making gear wheels to come up with a new way to tell the time. There’s just some really, really cool projects that come out of that cross-disciplinary approach. And increasingly, what employers are saying to me is yes, STEM skills are cool and we want the people who apply to us to have an interest in that, but what they’re really looking for is that ability to work with other people across those different areas. So those simple things like teamwork and adaptability and creative thinking and things like that. So I think fostering that cross-disciplinary work really helps with those skills.

[00:12:30]
Ben Newsome: No, actually I agree. I was sitting at a dinner last week or so, and I was sitting with a bloke who does a lot of efforts in innovation labs, gets a bunch of people from all sorts of disciplines and just nicely bashes their heads together for a little bit until they come up with interesting solutions to a particular problem. And I was chatting with him, okay, how do you do this? And there are certain ways to accelerate, but it’s the mix of people that actually makes the difference. We could all be engineers, and we could all be technologists or whatever, but it’s amazing what happens when you put a data expert with an artist with the person who is building the thing, who is the project engineer, and also has the accountancy there as well because they’re the one that the dollars have to flow somewhere.

[00:13:18]
Ben Newsome: Having those people all converse, I actually said, why does it need an innovation lab to make this happen? Unfortunately, some of these sites may be that siloed, they only ever meet via email. Not always, but those barriers mean that there’s naturally a barrier to innovation and therefore not so good. So it’s great for kids to see what happens when you really get cool people together and try and solve a problem, because that’s the lot of impetus in not just large companies, but also small agile companies as well, to try and make things happen faster and better. It’s really cool.

[00:13:52]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, but then you think about the school system, right? So one of the things that I’ve always been talking about is the fact that we are so super focused on content in the curriculum. And the content is really siloed, as you know. There’s different things to tick off according to different subject areas. So how do you create something which is going to test these skills and allow you to embed these programmes without doing a massive amount of work to say, okay, I’ve got this curriculum point here and I’ve got to include this assessment and I need to hit this curriculum point, how does that work with your assessment?

[00:14:28]
Heather Catchpole: So there is so much box-ticking involved that it kind of stymies these cross-disciplinary approaches. And it doesn’t say, yeah, let’s test teamwork and creative thinking and things like that. It says let’s test do you know how to represent data and have you created a narrative of this particular sort. So I think there’s a lot in the Australian curriculum which makes it really time-consuming to develop these things and makes it a difficult thing to do.

[00:14:58]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s such a challenge because we do a lot of work with teachers in parallel trying to look at how you can embed programmes like this in, and the amount of teacher innovation out there is just amazing. There are so many cool teachers trying to do cool stuff, but you’re right, the syllabus gets in the way. And they’ll even say that, these are not my words, this is the teachers themselves. And people listening in, if you’re a teacher, I’m wondering if you’re nodding your head. Please write in, let us know what you think about this sort of thing.

[00:15:30]
Ben Newsome: This is a global phenomenon that all classroom teachers know, and yet the syllabus is still in the way. And it’s such a hard nut to crack. I suspect it’s certainly a bit difficult for you and I as outsiders, because we are, we’re not within the formal education space. But I am seeing though, working with schools all over the place, that there is this movement, especially at the grassroots level, to try and embed this in deeper. The trouble always just boils down to time and yes, the checking of the boxes.

[00:16:09]
Heather Catchpole: No, it is. Actually, I recently was talking with some computer science education teachers and they were looking at how the Australian curriculum compares to New Zealand, various other countries, and there was a lot of talk about that, do you hit the broad teaching and get kids across a whole bunch of things, or do you hit the specific knowledge?

[00:16:44]
Heather Catchpole: But what I increasingly hear, particularly from the tech companies, is we can teach this, we can teach you R if you’re a data scientist, we can teach you the up-to-date programming language, we can teach you whatever those things are, but we can’t teach you to be broadly across a whole bunch of things. We expect that to come out of the education system. So yeah, it’s just really interesting to see those two areas grow, and I guess that’s where we try and sit in Careers with STEM in the middle is to sort of go, hey, this is what the employers want, and hey, this is what you might get out of school, this is your study pathway so far, so how do you bridge that gap?

[00:17:23]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, like you, I came out of uni four years down the track going, I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life. So, bit of a passion project. But by the way, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a few different business accelerators and whatnot, and it’s very much a common theme. So if you are an educator in a classroom, please do this, collaboration. That is the one thing that is the common thread no matter what. It doesn’t matter what problem you’re trying to solve and whatnot, it’s how do we make people work together in a way that’s actually positive.

[00:18:00]
Ben Newsome: I’ve never really been a massive fan of the name soft skills, because sometimes they’re generally hard. But it turns out that interpersonal relationships are a thing, and if you want to get across something really well in a very hard deadline with potentially high pressure, you’re going to have to work with people, and well, and effectively. And so obviously sometimes you’re going to have some abrasive contacts and certain ideas clash, but being able to work those through are incredibly important. And so if you can put your students in a place where perhaps there is a little bit of friction, not too much, you don’t need classroom brawls, but enough friction to be able to get the kids to go, you know what, this is tough, this is challenging, we’re going to have to work together because the clocks are ticking. They are going to have to learn those skills, and as they go into undergraduate and postgraduate, etc, they’ve had that opportunity to do it before they get in front of employers, and they’ll be better off for it.

[00:18:57]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah. Do you know one of the simple things that I’d love to do is to get some sort of system that allows kids to emoji comment on each other’s work. Just thumbs up, claps and stuff like that, because I find with collaborative work, certainly in my own business, sometimes just giving someone a thumbs up and just saying, hey, I’m here, I’m listening to you, I think you’ve done good work, is a really cool way to do that. So some kind of maths app where they could co-work on homework and boost each other in some way, I think that’d be a really cool way to foster those connections and collaborations within students.

[00:19:31]
Ben Newsome: True. There’s actually something I’ve never really had a chance to play out, I swear I’ve mentioned this at some point in this podcast, I can’t remember, there’s been too many of them, but there’s this application, I wanted to dive in one day and just see it actually work well, it’s this thing called Kialo. I don’t know if that’s how you’re meant to spell it, I’ll say the way it’s spelled, K-I-A-L-O. It’s designed to be able to promote discourse between people with opposing views in a way that allows you to evaluate your side of argument versus the other person’s side of argument without the pure unbridled emotion that comes when you put 300 kids in a room.

[00:20:24]
Heather Catchpole: Yeah, that sounds great. Actually, one of the other tools that I came across on that ANSTO hackathon was there’s a shared ideas generating board called the Bad Ideas Board. I thought it was such a cool way to go about starting on brainstorming a project is come up with the worst ideas that you can. And then you start to talk about, you know, hey actually there’s something about that idea that seems stupid and crazy, but it might just work. So I thought that was a really nice collaborative tool as well.

[00:20:52]
Ben Newsome: That’s really powerful. Because if you keep coming up with the safe approach, you produce predictable and relatively mundane answers to a problem. And unless you went into some crazy headspace for a moment, perhaps you wouldn’t have made a connection to something that was actually feasible because you weren’t keen to go there in the first place. I love that, Bad Ideas Board. Really good idea.

[00:21:16]
Heather Catchpole: Let’s try it out sometime.

[00:21:18]
Ben Newsome: Tell you what, outside of this podcast, Heather and I do talk. So we don’t have the Bad Ideas Board, but we do some bad ideas over the phone.

[00:21:26]
Heather Catchpole: That’s all part of it, isn’t it?

[00:21:29]
Ben Newsome: Look, hey, I know you’re going to have to zip real soon, but look, Heather, thank you for jumping on the podcast here. Now I understand that you’ve got a bit of a thing for teachers to hear about.

[00:21:41]
Heather Catchpole: Yes. So a couple of things that are happening right now. We’ve got our annual educators survey. So if you’ve heard of Careers with STEM or you haven’t, do hop on the site, careerswithstem.com. Let us know what you think. We always love to get that feedback and to find ways to improve what we’re doing. We also have a free mag opportunity, because we’re all about free magazines.

[00:22:00]
Heather Catchpole: Thanks to Google, they are sponsoring free copies of the Careers with Technology magazine. They’ll also pay your postage. So if you would like to get a bunch of copies, if you’ve kind of always wondered what it’s about, hop on there and have a look for that free offer, and you can set your 2021 up with some cool stuff that you can give out to the kids, using the classroom or just leave lying around the library.

[00:22:24]
Ben Newsome: A friend of mine once said, if it’s free, it’s for me.

[00:22:28]
Heather Catchpole: Teachers love free stuff. Every time I send out free stuff, the primary school teachers are always writing in saying, what about us? You give stuff to high schools, what about us? So this goes to any schools, primary schools, high schools, if you want some copies, just hop on to there and let us know.

[00:22:44]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. Hey, before you run away, something I always ask people, before they run away every time, I always like to know people’s advice on certain areas. And clearly you are all about Careers with STEM, you created a magazine around it, I’m guessing you like it. So if you had to have a room full of just about to graduate teachers, it doesn’t matter whether it’s primary or high school, ones who are just about to launch into helping kids understand about science, technology, engineering, maths, and especially career pathways, what would be some advice to be able to help them on their way?

[00:23:15]
Heather Catchpole: Okay, so tricky question to end with. I love that one. Look, I think that the teacher programmes are pretty cool right now and I think there’s amazing stuff that’s being taught. I know that frequently they’re trying to teach communication to science teachers and science to education and communication teachers. My passion is storytelling and I just think that stories are really powerful. I think that there are stories that connect with all different kids too. So I’d just say look out for those stories.

[00:23:58]
Heather Catchpole: It’s about connecting on the human level. So look out to find the ways that you can connect with your students. And I always find that storytelling and just being authentic and being really vulnerable and being like, yep, this is me and I’m coming from this space and sharing who you are and what you’re interested and passionate with and about and trying to connect with kids on that level. That would just be my takeaway.

[00:24:15]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. Actually, you just sparked a memory of mine. Jump on the Fizzics website, the one that’s spelled weirdly, F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S. Type in TED Talks Kids or something to do with kids, TED Talks Kids into the search box of our website. You will find a number of embedded videos from the TEDx talks done by students, people who still haven’t left secondary school yet. They are incredibly inspiring because they’re creating really cool, actual solutions to real world problems. And so I kind of like the idea of students hearing from other students who are doing it, rather than us old people talking about it. I think that would be really cool and that would actually go, that would link very nicely with what Heather you’re talking about, which is story, because it matters.

[00:25:00]
Ben Newsome: Thank you again, Heather. Have a fantastic afternoon. I will too. It’s nearly the weekend for me, but by the time some people listen to this podcast, maybe it’s the evening or the morning, whatever it is. Whatever it is, I hope you’re having a great afternoon. And Heather, thanks very much for joining me.

[00:25:12]
Heather Catchpole: Thanks, Ben.

[00:25:14]
Announcer: We hope you’ve been enjoying the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We love making science make sense. Why don’t you book us for a science show or workshop in your school? If you’re outside of Australia, you can connect with us via a virtual excursion. See our website for more.

[00:25:31]
Ben Newsome: Well, there we go. That was Heather Catchpole, who is the Head of Content and a co-founder of Refraction Media. And by the way, if you want to find out more about Refraction Media, head back all the way back to season one, episode 21, where we got to hang out with the other co-founder of Refraction Media, Karen Taylor-Brown, where we can hear about what they were doing even in more detail. It’s a really, really cool company and they’re doing an amazing job helping kids understand about Careers with STEM. It’s a really, really good thing.

[00:26:00]
Ben Newsome: Now, definitely head on over to their website. So it’s careerswithstem.com.au and find out that not just the educator survey, and please do the educator survey, and we’ll give you that link in the show notes as usual, but you just might be able to get some free copies of the 2019 Code magazine. So go to careerswithstem.com.au/order-free-2019-code-magazines, and you’ll find that all there. And as usual, we’ll definitely put those things in the show notes.

[00:26:29]
Ben Newsome: So, that is enough of this particular podcast. And by the way, that is the last podcast of 2020. We do have more things coming up for sure in 2021 and beyond. So anyway, I hope you have a fantastic break no matter where you are. And we certainly will, and we’re really looking forward to another fun-filled year as always. That’s what we do here on the Fizzics Ed Podcast, as well as going out to schools, libraries, museums, and more through Fizzics Education’s outreach programmes. So look, have a fantastic afternoon, morning, evening, wherever you are, and I’ll catch you another time.

[00:26:59]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

[00:27:26]
Announcer: This podcast is part of the Australian Educators Online Network. aeon.net.au

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Careers with STEM initiative?

Careers with STEM is a flagship brand created by Refraction Media to inspire students by showcasing diverse, real-world pathways in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It focuses on connecting STEM skills with various industries to show students how these fields apply to their everyday interests.

How can Australian secondary schools access the magazines?

Refraction Media distributes over 1.75 million magazines to secondary schools across Australia and New Zealand. Educators can often access these resources for free, including specific editions like the Code or Cybersecurity magazines, to help guide students towards modern career opportunities.

What does the STEM + X formula mean?

The STEM + X approach encourages students to combine a STEM skill (like coding or data analysis) with a personal passion (the ‘X’), such as sport, fashion, social justice, or music. This framework helps students see STEM as a versatile toolkit rather than a narrow, isolated career path.

Why is diversity and representation emphasized in these resources?

Heather Catchpole highlights that dismantling stereotypes is essential for innovation. By featuring role models from diverse backgrounds and genders, the initiative helps all students see themselves in STEM roles, ensuring the future workforce is equitable and capable of solving global challenges.

How has the 2020 pandemic changed the landscape of STEM careers?

The events of 2020 accelerated the digital transformation and highlighted the critical importance of health science and data. Heather notes that this period made ‘future’ jobs feel immediate, increasing the demand for digital literacy and critical thinking across all sectors of the economy.

Discussion points summarised from the Careers with STEM with Heather Catchpole with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

Challenging the Lab Coat Stereotype

Consider how often STEM is portrayed as a lonely profession in a sterile lab. How can we better communicate to students that STEM is collaborative, creative, and found in every industry from professional sports to high-end fashion? Changing this perception is key to engaging a broader demographic of learners.

The Intersection of Humanities and STEM

Reflect on how skills typically associated with the humanities, such as empathy, ethics, and communication, are vital in technical fields. As we build AI and global health systems, discuss why a well-rounded education that includes both the arts and sciences is more important than ever.