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.

[00:00:15]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. I tell you what, yet again we’ve got another big week because we get to speak with Gillian King-Cargile, who heads up STEM Read. Now, if you’ve never come across STEM Read, that’s okay, you’re certainly going to hear about it now. It comes out of Northern Illinois University and it’s all about inspiring readers to learn more about science, technology, engineering, and maths using popular fiction, which is an amazingly simple concept but incredibly powerful.

[00:01:03]
Ben Newsome: The team at STEM Read do an amazing job to get both the ravenous and the reluctant readers into science. They’re using reading as a gateway, let’s be honest, but how cool is it? They run a whole bunch of professional development programmes for teachers to do exactly that, as well as run a bunch of camps themselves for the kids to not only discuss the science concepts that can be found in novels and things, but also do experiments based on what they’ve read about, which is so cool.

[00:01:52]
Ben Newsome: Gillian King-Cargile is the founder and the director of STEM Read and she’s got a really interesting background. She is the director and founder of NIU STEM Read, but she’s also got a background in film production and creative writing, which means she also coordinates a science fiction writing competition for NIU and directs their creative writing summer day camp for middle school students. She’s very much about developing and nurturing local and national literary communities and she creates a whole bunch of connections between university experts, community professionals, and learners of all ages.

[00:02:40]
Ben Newsome: Gillian is passionate when it comes to linking fiction and science together and getting kids to understand how it all works. And without listening to any more about me talking about it, I’d rather hear from Gillian herself, who’s got a lot to say and we’ve got a lot to learn.

[00:02:49]
Gillian King-Cargile: Thanks for having me! I’m excited to be here.

[00:02:51]
Ben Newsome: Look, I am totally stoked that you’re popping onto this because I must say, we’ve had a lot of fun interviewing all sorts of cool people, but gee you’ve got an unusual thing that really I think would just grab people’s attention so fast. Gillian, tell me, what is it that you do?

[00:03:13]
Gillian King-Cargile: I am the founder and director of the STEM Read programme at Northern Illinois University. What we do is we explore science, technology, engineering, and maths through fun, popular fiction books. It is a little bit of a trick, right? I look at it as kind of hiding broccoli under cheese. How do you get people excited about science and maths and STEM concepts if they’re not interested in it at first, or if they think that they can’t do it? We look for fun, creative ways to get people excited about learning about those subjects.

[00:03:57]
Ben Newsome: Perhaps a Freudian slip or whatever it is, but I totally get it. This science by stealth is a thing. We ran a big public outreach programme out in Sydney Olympic Park and we had about 7,000 people come through. It was specifically designed to be right in between two major football games. We had all these people doing science stuff, and we should have called it science by stealth and be done with it. But I must say, you get to do something quite interesting and review some of children’s and adults’ favourite books with people from a STEM concept. That’s just awesome.

[00:04:30]
Gillian King-Cargile: It’s so fun. Really, what we look for first and foremost is a great story. So often we’re looking at books that kids might be excited about or adults might be excited about, but they didn’t really think about using them in the classroom. One of the examples I give is Maze Runner by James Dashner. That’s a great sci-fi dystopian novel and we have these kids trapped in a maze. Every day they go out running through the maze looking for a way out, trying to map it, trying to discover its secrets. Every night they’re terrorised by these giant mechanical slug monsters.

[00:05:20]
Gillian King-Cargile: You wouldn’t really think about using that book in a science class or in a maths class, or even in an English class because it’s pop fiction. People don’t often take books like that seriously in an academic setting. But really, you can pull a lot of concepts out. How many calories would you need each day if you were running the maze from morning until night? How do you defend yourself from a giant mechanical slug monster? Is there something that you could engineer to keep it away from you or to trap it? And then just the cryptography that’s in the book. If the maze is moving and there’s different patterns, how can you recognise those patterns and what are they telling you?

[00:05:57]
Ben Newsome: What’s fun about that is it really comes down to a fundamental literacy. Do they know what’s going on? Do they actually understand their stuff to be able to pull apart a fiction book and say, “Is it fact or fiction?” That’s just great. I’d imagine that with the kids pulling it apart, it means their imagination runs wild. It kind of reminds me of someone I ran into at University of Sydney. She was doing the mathematics of a zombie apocalypse. Just the idea of how would the infection rates work, etc.? And that’s effectively what you could do with nearly every science fiction book around, and even beyond science fiction.

[00:06:38]
Gillian King-Cargile: We’ve done other zombie apocalypse things. We have a maths test prep programme that one of my colleagues created that is all about the mathematics of the zombie apocalypse. We’re always looking for ways to use zombies! But definitely, it’s not just those books that you might think of as science fiction. I have publishers who want to send us books and they’re like, “I’m going to send you something like STEM Sammy Builds This.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s good, but I want the fiction books. I want the ones that tell a good story first because that’s really how we’re going to connect those people who are reluctant readers or reluctant in science or maths, because they need that creative entry point into it.”

[00:07:29]
Gillian King-Cargile: We’ve used books like The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. We’ve done things like cancer research and adaptive technologies for the blind. We actually just did a historical fiction book, which is The Detective’s Assistant by Kate Hannigan. That book is about the first female Pinkerton Detective Agency agent and she gets caught up in… it’s a little hard to explain everything that she’s doing, but the upshot of all of the cases is that she’s involved in thwarting an attempt to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.

[00:08:20]
Gillian King-Cargile: You wouldn’t think of that as a STEM book really, but if you dig into it, really what they were doing was looking at coding and ciphers and trying to determine what was happening. They were looking at clues for things. As I was digging into it, I was like, everything that they’re doing are all of the skills required for computational thinking. It’s all of that pattern recognition, it’s looking for clues. It lent itself to maths, to ciphers, to all these different things that really became STEM concepts. And really, just the idea of being a detective is so much about observation, and in STEM, observation is key. Observation and inquiry. Although you wouldn’t think of using a historical fiction novel, it worked very well.

[00:09:08]
Ben Newsome: I reckon it would. The idea that it doesn’t put science in a bucket, it doesn’t put STEM in a bucket and say, “This is the silo that you’re going to work in now and you won’t worry about art, history, or anything else.” That’s not really the case, and I like that idea that it broadens kids’ minds. Just thinking back to how STEM Read started, what made you kick off on this journey?

[00:09:32]
Gillian King-Cargile: A lot of things. I’m not a scientist, I am a science appreciator, is what I call myself. I really love science and I think it’s awesome. I like watching science documentaries and reading books about science and watching SciShow on YouTube. But I fell out of the science path. I loved biology, I loved epidemiology and studying weird viruses and marine biology, all the crazy creatures under the sea. And then I got to chemistry, and I just couldn’t connect with chemistry.

[00:10:14]
Gillian King-Cargile: The long version of this story, if that’s okay? I was looking for people whose notes I could borrow so I could try to figure out what I was doing wrong in chemistry. My friend, I saw her taking really good notes. Her name is Erica and she was taking lots and lots of notes. I was like, “Erica knows what she’s doing in chemistry, this will be good.” I borrowed her notes, looked at them, and they just said “Meow” over and over again. I was like, “What’s going on? You’re just writing ‘Meow’ for pages and pages.” And she started singing “Meow, meow, meow, meow…” the Meow Mix commercial!

[00:11:08]
Gillian King-Cargile: We were not doing well in chemistry. And then I read Jurassic Park, and I gave her a copy of Jurassic Park. I loved it, I’ve always loved dinosaurs. She came back and she said, “This is the best book ever! Scientists could make dinosaurs!” I was like, “Well, maybe.” And she was like, “No, scientists could do it. Scientists can do anything! I’m going to be a scientist.” I said, “Oh, okay, yeah, good luck with that, Meow.” But she actually cracked down in chemistry. She actually went on and she got a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University.

[00:11:52]
Gillian King-Cargile: I don’t think that she had ever really connected in school. She always did well, but nothing kept her attention until she found a creative entry point into it, and then it started to click for her. My background is in writing, writing and filmmaking. I came to it from the other side and looked at storytelling as a way that we can connect to things. We remember things, we engage more if there’s a compelling story. I think that’s why I fell out of chemistry. What I really try to do in my programme is find those stories, find that creative spark that will get people excited about it.

[00:12:39]
Ben Newsome: I bet. It’s really producing a platform for people just to debate a concept. Every now and then, do you have people in front of you and there’s a particular concept… I could imagine them having a big fight over Michael Crichton’s book, going into Jurassic Park, saying “Is this possible with DNA, yes or no?” It could be a scientific bunfight. I suppose that’s where the debate and where potentially a lot of the learning is.

[00:13:25]
Gillian King-Cargile: Right. What we do with the books is we have experts read them. We haven’t done Jurassic Park, but we’ve done things like The Martian by Andy Weir. We talk about how close are we to colonising Mars? How close are we to setting up a base there? What barriers are there between what we have now and what they have in the book, and how are we addressing those? It really becomes an idea of talking about what’s possible and what might be possible.

[00:13:46]
Ben Newsome: I tell you what, speaking about what might be possible, I was lucky enough to be up in Chicago sitting in amongst 10,000 or of our closest friends at the International Society for Technology in Education. You got to speak with Andy Weir on the big stage. I mean, gee, that must have been almost starry-eyed, I suspect. How was he backstage?

[00:14:09]
Gillian King-Cargile: I spent the week with him. Andy Weir is the best! He was so gracious, he’s so smart, and he’s just really fun and sarcastic and just everything that you would imagine that he is based on his writing and his interviews. That’s how he is. And so curious. Actually, after we went to ISTE, we got the opportunity, I took him to Argonne National Lab here in Illinois. They do lots of different science around energy, and really they think about how they create the future.

[00:14:58]
Gillian King-Cargile: We went and we toured nanotechnology, energy storage, and supercomputing. It was so amazing to just watch him geek out and ask questions and get curious about every little thing in the lab and talk to these scientists. I think the best thing was Andy Weir meeting the person who was taking us through the energy storage department. He said, “I want you to pop into this office and meet this guy.” He popped in, he met this researcher who was an older man, very quiet. They just had a nice conversation and they walked out and the guy who was giving us the tour said, “That’s the man who invented the energy storage system for the Chevy Volt, and he’s revolutionising energy storage.” I was like, Andy Weir met the Volt guy! This is amazing. So much creativity, so much scientific knowledge in one place.

[00:15:58]
Ben Newsome: If anyone ever gets a chance to listen in on Andy Weir, he’s got a fascinating story. He really does. And I can see he’s highly curious and I 100% know that authors are just outright… they’re writing about a particular topic that they love and exploring it in great detail. Actually, just thinking about the way Andy threw together The Martian… he had a bit more work than that, but just the way that it was published bit by bit by bit by bit, and just the momentum behind it. This all comes down to the fact that fiction, books themselves… everyone talks about the net as being the thing that everyone can consume, but seriously, paperback classic hardcopy things still have so much currency amongst the world.

[00:16:53]
Gillian King-Cargile: That’s what I think of Andy Weir, his story going from being a computer science person and a software engineer and writing that book in his spare time basically as a hobby. He had tried to publish, it didn’t work out, and he said, “I’m just going to publish this thing chapter by chapter online.” It took years, so he was an overnight success over something like 15 years of quote-unquote failure. So, it’s a really interesting story.

[00:17:29]
Gillian King-Cargile: I love that idea of what we were at Argonne to talk about, which was the idea of future-telling. The idea that creativity is kind of this cross-cutting concept. We think that artists and writers are very creative and they sit around all day in this idealised studio space being creative and churning out these books. And scientists are often thought of as these very analytical people and they’re very serious and they’re doing their research and that’s what they do. But scientists have to be so creative. There’s such a connection between the idea of what scientists are doing and what storytellers are doing.

[00:18:18]
Gillian King-Cargile: In this concept of future-telling, both of them are imagining what they’d like the future to be. Maybe it’s 30 years from now, 50 years from now. A science fiction author will imagine that future and write a story. And then the next generation of scientists might be inspired by that story and actually start doing those lines of research to make that story a reality. I love that cyclical nature of it. Science is influencing science fiction, which is influencing more science. Really both of these people are storytellers in their own way and they’re bringing about the future that might become in the next 50 to 100 years through their creativity.

[00:19:00]
Ben Newsome: STEM Read has really done a fantastic job, and I agree with all that. I mean, isn’t creativity just the mind having fun in a lot of ways? But STEM Read has done a fantastic job. You’re running field trips, and by the way, congratulations on having a bit on NPR as well with the STEM Read podcast. Well done with that.

[00:19:26]
Ben Newsome: With all the different bits of success, I’m guessing that occasionally things might not have gone well in your educational life. This is very much a science education podcast, so I’m very much interested about not just what we do well, but also what we could possibly have improved once upon a time. Tell us a bit about those.

[00:19:48]
Gillian King-Cargile: Yeah, we screw up all the time! But I think it’s a matter of being flexible and able to think on your feet and adjust. So, yeah, STEM Read does… we

Frequently Asked Questions

How does STEM Read use fiction to teach science?
Gillian describes the approach as “hiding broccoli under cheese.” By taking a popular story that students already love, the programme identifies plot points that can be solved using scientific principles. For example, calculating the calorie intake needed for the protagonists in The Maze Runner to run all day, or engineering a defence against mechanical monsters.

Can historical fiction or romance novels be used for STEM education?
Yes. Gillian highlights using The Detective’s Assistant (historical fiction) to teach computational thinking, pattern recognition, and ciphers. Similarly, The Fault in Our Stars was used to explore cancer research and adaptive technologies for the blind, proving that any compelling narrative can provide a creative entry point into STEM.

What is the concept of “future-telling” discussed in the episode?
Future-telling is the cyclical relationship between science and science fiction. A writer imagines a future technology and writes a story about it; that story inspires the next generation of scientists to conduct the research necessary to make that fictional technology a reality.

Why does STEM Read intentionally design activities where students might fail?
Failure is a critical part of the scientific process. In a Hurricane Katrina simulation based on the I Survived series, students initially faced long lines and resource shortages, causing many to fail. This taught them about the real-world frustrations of disaster response and the importance of iteration and community rebuilding.

How can teachers start integrating STEM into their literacy blocks?
Gillian suggests that teachers don’t need to start from scratch. Instead of a “recipe” with a single endpoint, teachers should look for fun books they are already reading and find one small piece—an engineering challenge or a maths problem—that excites them. Collaborative teaching between English and science departments is also highly recommended.

Discussion points summarised from the STEM Read with Gillian King-Cargile with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

The “Broccoli under Cheese” Pedagogy
Consider how narrative can lower the “affective filter” for students who feel intimidated by technical subjects. If a student identifies as a “reader” rather than a “scientist,” does framing a physics problem as a plot point in their favourite novel change their willingness to engage with the maths?

Moving from Recipes to Inquiry
Reflect on the difference between a classroom “recipe” (where every student achieves the same result) and a true STEM challenge. If every student’s bridge or circuit looks identical at the end of a lesson, have they engaged in creative problem-solving, or simply followed instructions? Gillian argues that open-ended challenges reveal truer levels of conceptual understanding.

The Ethics of Fictional Science
Use popular fiction like Jurassic Park or The Martian to debate the ethical implications of scientific advancement. Just because a technology is engineered in a story, should it be engineered in real life? This allows students to explore the social and ethical dimensions of STEM within a safe, fictionalised context.