Audio Transcript

Published: 30 July 2017
APA 7 Citation: Newsome, B. (Host). (2017, July 30). Teaching STEM lessons using maritime history [Audio podcast transcript]. Fizzics Education. https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/podcast/fizzicsed/teaching-stem-lessons-using-maritime-history/

Ben Newsome CF is the recipient of the 2023 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and a Churchill Fellow. He is a global leader in science communication and the founder of Fizzics Education.

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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.

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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.

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Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed podcast. My name is Ben Newsome, and I’m really glad to bring a good friend of mine, Anne Doran, to you to discuss all the sorts of things that happen in Australia’s National Maritime Museum. I’ve been working with Anne for quite a few years through Virtual Excursions Australia and was quite interested to discover how she landed the role as an education officer and what they do in a major maritime museum.

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Ben Newsome: She used to work for it’s quite a bit of a mouthful here, the Hurstville City Library Museum and Gallery. This museum and gallery is sort of tucked away in the southern part of Sydney, where initially she was working in exhibitions and projects for the public before changing a career path a little bit to work as a teacher librarian for New South Wales public schools. Now she’s working heavily in virtual excursions and exhibitions and outreach type sort of operations in our major maritime museum. And she’s got some really interesting stories when it comes to working with kids in a museum. So let’s just dive right into this interview.

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Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed podcast.

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Ben Newsome: Hi Anne Doran, welcome to the Fizzics Ed podcast.

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Anne Doran: Hello!

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Ben Newsome: Hello, you sound always a bit hollow there. Whereabouts are you coming from?

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Anne Doran: I’m coming from a little meeting room in the offices of Wharf 7 at Darling Harbour. So we’re right on the harbour down in Sydney.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, in the Australian National Maritime Museum. Is it an awesome spot? I mean, I’ve got young little kids and I know they just love those ships on the harbour. They’re unreal.

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Anne Doran: Yes, we’re very lucky that we have some real climb-aboard experiences for the kids to actually come and have a look at and be able to experience. So we have a couple of different ships, going from warships right down to the full-scale replica of Endeavour, which was a pretty famous scientific ship I might add at the time.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, actually I was really keen to go into this. Actually, before we go into that part, I mean yeah definitely we are a STEM podcast and we’re definitely going to talk science on this, but obviously you’re coming from a maritime museum, and not just any old one, it’s Australia’s National one. So how did you fall into this role?

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Anne Doran: Ah, well once upon a time ago, I was a teacher librarian and I was working three days a week and I sort of thought it’d be really, really cool to extend my skills. So I saw a job for casual museum person at a like a sort of a general person at the Hurstville Museum and Gallery.

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Anne Doran: And from there I applied and lo and behold, I actually got the job. And I was there for about three years just working on the days that I wasn’t working at the school, and I learned lots of things like how to put an exhibition together, how to run the reception desk, right through to shifting furniture, which is an important skill when you’re an education officer.

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Ben Newsome: Absolutely. I mean I was talking with Karen Player a couple of episodes ago and she started oh nearly 20 years ago at the Australian Museum, not that far from you actually. And she started off as a volunteer purely out of just interest in the site and 20 years later she’s still there. I mean, I think museums are a bit like that.

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Anne Doran: They are. People come and stay. So I’d had a particularly interesting day at school and this job got emailed to me and I just went, “Ooh, I don’t know if I can actually apply for this. I’m not too sure about it.” And my husband encouraged me and said, “Where do you smile the most?” And I went, “Oh, I’m actually smiling more at the museum.” So I applied and I got it, and I’m almost been here for nearly five years and I am still learning every day.

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Ben Newsome: I love what you just said. “Where I smile the most.” That’s awesome. What a great metric.

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Anne Doran: Yeah, well that was from my husband and I just sort of went, “Well, yeah, that is probably where I am enjoying myself a little bit more now.” I mean I love the teaching, don’t get me wrong, but I found the museum side of things stimulated me more than what I was doing when I was just a teacher. And I mean I still miss it when some of the kids come through, but I’ve got the opportunity now to actually meet lots of different children rather than just having the class that’s in front of me.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, and just out of interest, I mean what got you into teaching in the first place?

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Anne Doran: I have always been a teacher. I didn’t realise it until I was a mature-age student, but I was teaching swimming and dance at the age of 16. And got a normal job, just an office job, and then had my kids, and I went back to teaching swimming and dancing. And everyone thought I was a teacher, like everybody, and I just went, “No,” and they just went, “Well, you better get yourself qualified, love, because you should be.”

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Ben Newsome: Actually that’s true. You often just can tell people that they’re almost born into it in some ways. That’s cool. So I mean obviously wind the clock forward and now you’re at the Australian National Maritime Museum and you’re heavily involved in all types of school visits coming into you as well as doing outreach via video conference and things. And obviously considering this is very much a science education podcast, what are the sort of things that your museum does that just makes well the maritime come alive?

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Anne Doran: I guess the hands-on part. Being able to physically walk around a ship helps kids actually, you know, we’ve all got our own special Endeavour bump from walking around that ship. It’s quite shallow in some spots.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, if listeners are wondering like think of like the old tall ships, the wooden ships. And if you’ve ever been underneath in the cargo hold there, not even in the cargo hold, just literally in the living quarters, it’s not that high.

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Anne Doran: No, and Endeavour in particular, they put a false floor in to be able to take the scientists that were actually on the voyage of discovery. So they put in extra accommodation, so one part of the ship is actually half the size of what it should be.

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Ben Newsome: So it’s crawl zone.

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Anne Doran: Well the voyage itself, Cook’s voyage wasn’t meant to be necessarily exploration. It started as understanding the problem of longitude and latitude because that was the biggest problem that ships kept disappearing because they kept getting their readings wrong.

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Anne Doran: So they decided to go to Tahiti to record the Transit of Venus so that they’d be able to have scientists in three different places of the world recording so that they could have an understanding of where the world sat. I other people can say this much better than me, but basically they were able to take measurements based on this astronomical event.

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Anne Doran: From there, they Cook basically was given secret orders to go forth and try and find the great southern land. They sort of knew that it was around because the Dutch kept bumping into the West Coast of Australia and they didn’t like Australia at all. And so they they sort of knew where it was, but they didn’t really know, and that’s how it became a scientific voyage because they had Joseph Banks, who was a well-renowned botanist, who brought his own science crew with him such as people to do biology, astronomy and also recordings of different botany that they found. So that’s why we call it a scientific voyage as well as Cook doing the cartography of the actual land when they came along the East Coast.

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Ben Newsome: It’s a fantastic story too. I mean mind you, eventually it ends up with Cook not so doing well with a native tribe at one point, but the actual voyage itself was stunning. I mean I know that the Transit of Venus, it was recorded all over the world. I mean there were I know when I was reading Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, there were parties all over the place, land and sea, just trying to work this Transit of Venus out because of the nature of this is your window, this is when it’s going to happen. Actually there’s the thing, if anyone’s listening to this, go check out Bill Bryson’s book on this. It’s the history that actually happens while science happens is amazing.

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Anne Doran: Yeah, and sort of we often compare Cook’s Endeavour to they sort of knew what was out there to the earliest spaceship, the Endeavour. Because although they knew what was out there, it was still a voyage of discovery and they weren’t too sure how many would actually make it home. And Cook in himself actually was one of the first people that didn’t lose many people at all to diseases such as scurvy.

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Ben Newsome: He was the guy who brought in the limes.

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Anne Doran: Yes.

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Ben Newsome: Cool.

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Anne Doran: Yes, and it was that voyage that he trialed it and he was very surprised. He actually used to trick his crewmen to actually taking in Vitamin C via sauerkraut. They didn’t want to eat it because it tasted awful. So what he did was, “Well, I’m giving this to the gentlemen and to the officers, so you can’t have any,” and that automatically made them want to eat it and then saved a lot of their lives.

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Ben Newsome: Reverse psychology and it still works as a parent or a teacher to this day.

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Anne Doran: That’s exactly right.

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Ben Newsome: I didn’t know I didn’t know that story, that’s awesome. So I mean these days you could just put it with a hot dog and have it like a New York hot dog, but there you go, that’s cool.

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Ben Newsome: So um when classes come and visit you because clearly you’ve got people off the street coming and visiting the museum because it’s a major establishment in the centre of Sydney, but you’ve got classes coming in and visiting and of course there’s the history side and the English side might not. Do you get many coming in just to actually mesh some of their science topics with what you do?

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Anne Doran: Yes, so one of our most popular programme and we call term three SCC time because that is the chemistry elective, Shipwrecks, Corrosion and Conservation. And so we offer basically a four-hour programme looking at the science behind corrosion and how they conserve shipwrecks artefacts. Sadly it’s out of the HSC at the end of the year, but it has been one of the biggest programmes that we we have.

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Ben Newsome: You go straight down oxidation and reduction reactions straight away.

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Anne Doran: Yes, um we do a hands-on session where they do identification of different corrosion products and the condition that affects the rate of corrosion. We talk about desalination, and then we also do a tour of a couple of the vessels, the warship in particular, and we show them the different parts where there has been corrosion. And we also look at the Sirius anchor which is a major artefact that we have here on site that was from the First Fleet that was actually pulled up from Norfolk Island. So you know, they look at the different conservation practices and the different things that have been done over time. Really interesting programme. It’s way beyond my science learning, but it’s certainly really interesting.

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Ben Newsome: But even just walking around, I mean obviously that’s a fantastic programme where she can book into and four hours diving right into, excuse the pun there, diving right into your marine science there, but the even just walking around your museum, there’s quite a bit to go with. I mean I know you’ve got a number of quite large, well they are, they’re quite large motors, quite large engines right in the heart of the museum. Is there any workshops around that or anything like that?

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Anne Doran: Uh yeah, we we had one that was faced around simple machines. So we looked at the different machines that are in the museum such as pulleys, which obviously every ship has lots of pulleys. Just uh the machines with their different bits and pieces, you know, how they levers and propellers and wheels and axles and inclined planes. So just yeah, we certainly have that simple machines where students can just look at these machines in practical terms rather than just having someone show them something, they’re actually seeing them working, or seen them how they would have been working. Not all of them are moving.

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Ben Newsome: What’s the thing? You’ve got a lot of workshops like I know only recently I was in there for the school holidays just gone past in April and you had the Pompeii visit, the Pompeii major exhibition. Is that still going?

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Anne Doran: Yes, so we’ve had a massive reaction to to that. And um for this month we’ve looked more at the history side of Pompeii, but Jeff is actually, my colleague, the senior education officer here is for science week month, August, he is looking at the science behind the archaeology as well as the science behind volcanoes. So we’re we’re looking at special workshops around that. So we’re taking a history programme and adding a bit of science to it.

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Ben Newsome: That’s right, and so many teachers know that it’s to be able to even just bring science to life or history to life, just bringing in different key learning areas together really makes just a workshop that kids just go, “Wow, there’s so much I can pull apart here.” I mean it reminds me of when kids are often at middle or primary school in Australia they study gold often. You can look at history, the arts, the crafts, the science of getting gold, the whole lot. You can do the same thing around, well your topics, very much so.

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Anne Doran: Yes, we don’t offer it as much now, but Jeff actually, once again my colleague, he actually wrote a programme called the Technology of Gold and it talked about all sorts of things with the gold. So it wasn’t just about the gold rushes but it was also about the mineral and how you would find it in a riverbank and things like that. But we’ve sort of not offering that one as much, but definitely there are programmes that do lend themselves to both history and science because without the history behind it, the science doesn’t work, and without the science, the history doesn’t really make a sense. So it’s good to be able to combine topics.

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Ben Newsome: Well one of the um things about boats they’ve been around for so long that there’s a bit you can do with I mean I know that kids just love like it’s a simple holiday workshop what floats your boat, literally what makes boats float. Getting kids to understand how it actually works can be interesting.

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Anne Doran: Yeah, well we actually offer another one called Submarine Adventure and that’s about buoyancy and the floating and sinking of how you would get a massive metal object up and down within the water and maneuverability. And we actually tie that to turtles. So it’s a same sort of physics behind it, you know, how do we know a how do we know how a turtle can sink? Well, it’s a similar sort of thing about how submarines float and sink. And the students actually get to go on um the submarine and have a look around on there as well. So they’re not only look looking at the buoyancy part of um submarines, but they’re also looking at the actual engines and the the mechanics and how do you fit so many people in such a small object.

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Ben Newsome: And what you’re hearing in the background is almost like it just got darkened in this room and just the thunder just went uh we just got a big storm coming over the top and it’s just roared just as you were talking about going down in submarines and the thunder’s coming in. But um yeah, I’m just um interested, I mean obviously you’ve got a lot of stuff going on and one of them is the distance learning programmes that you do. Let’s find out a bit more about those.

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Anne Doran: Sure. All right. Um we offer virtual excursions and we’re part of the VEA group.

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Ben Newsome: Virtual Excursions Australia, yeah.

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Anne Doran: Yes, which are a group of providers that come together and we we um talk things through and share ideas, which is really great and supportive, but also it helps us pass messages out to the wider audience because we, I don’t know, I think we have greater collateral when we work together.

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Ben Newsome: Was it Charles Bolden?

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Anne Doran: Yes! And my favourite thing about him, apart from just being this amazing speaker, the students asked him why did he want to become an astronaut? And at the time he said, “I joined the Marines because this was the only way that a poor black man was actually going to make a career.” And someone said, “Well, how did you get from the Marines into, you know, becoming an astronaut?” and he said, “I hated mud.”

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Ben Newsome: Fair enough.

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Anne Doran: And I just thought that is just wonderful. Like he he was the most down-to-earth person for an astronaut I’d ever ever met. Just totally lovely and so honest with the students. And the students that actually asked these questions, you know, they would never have an opportunity of speaking to an astronaut like like the head of NASA normally. So I call that my Inspiring Stories programmes. And you know, we’ve had people like him, we’ve had people like Lloyd Godson…

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Ben Newsome: Yeah I love love what Lloyd Godson does. Yeah.

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Anne Doran: He he is just the most beautiful guy. He loves talking to students and I’m hoping to have him again this year for our Science Week programmes, but just an absolute gem of a person who is mad crazy keen on science and everything to do with STEM and just his passion is getting kids excited about science.

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Ben Newsome: Probably should tell some listeners what Lloyd does.

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Anne Doran: Lloyd has a habit of, and so far he’s done it twice and he is hoping to do it again, and I’m not too sure where he is at with building his latest underwater habitat, but he likes to live underwater to prove to students that it can be done. So so far he’s done it twice and each time he’s extended his stay and he and his underwater habitats actually are self-sufficient. So he has to sit on a bike for a couple of hours a day to pump air in and there’s all these crazy things he does. And he’s amazing. I I just get blown away every time I um talk to him. He’s one of my favourites.

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Ben Newsome: That’s unreal. I know bloke does. Yeah absolutely. And being self-sufficient he has to not just plan his own air supply but food and waste and everything else in a habitat which he’s not going to raise out of the water, he’s keeping it in there the whole time. It’s really impressive.

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Anne Doran: Yeah, he’s he’s such a cool guy.

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Ben Newsome: So obviously you’ve done a lot of classes and things, and even when you were working as a teacher librarian, you’ve got classes that work and you’ve got classes that, yeah, they don’t. I mean, obviously there’ll be few and far between as you go along the ride, but um I’m just wondering, just out of interest, have you ever had this um, you know, a class where you go, “You know what? I really think this is going to work. I’m going to try and teach this thing,” and you know what? It just completely, just didn’t mesh at all?

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Anne Doran: Oh, there’s been there’s been many, and you you do learn from it. I’ve when I was thinking about this, I mean, it wasn’t necessarily my science lesson that failed. I mean, there has been a few where you think that you’ve got the right equipment and then something goes wrong and you just go, “You know what? We’re going to have to come back to this next week. Let’s abandon this” and stuff. But I do remember growing up in year seven, we had this science teacher who was hilarious. His name was Mr Burns.

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Ben Newsome: Oh good. Excellent name.

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Anne Doran: And he had a thing about volcanoes. And I think we I think we did about four volcanoes within a week, and we weren’t allowed to touch it. But I still remember there’s this one time that he put way, way, way too much sulphur in the bottom of the volcano.

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Ben Newsome: Right.

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Anne Doran: And the entire science area of De La Salle High School had to be evacuated because the smell was so bad that no one in all of the classes, the entire year seven had to be evacuated.

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Anne Doran: And he was told after that he was never to do another volcano again.

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Ben Newsome: Oh no. I hope that school has gone back onto doing volcanoes.

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Anne Doran: Well, I just think that teacher wasn’t allowed to. I don’t know what he did, each time he just got that more and more sulphuric acid, and I don’t know what happened, but that was a science lesson gone gone bad because I think we spent most of the lesson outside.

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Ben Newsome: And you remember it, and you were in year seven, and you still remember it.

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Anne Doran: I do.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, I wonder actually, wouldn’t that be an interesting study to actually have people going off the record with their names omitted, I wonder how many labs get evacuated per year.

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Anne Doran: Oh, I I think that there would have to be a few.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, I mean, mind you I’d say science teachers are highly professional and very, very rarely would it happen, but just purely because of mathematics, there is a bell curve where things go wrong eventually if you do things enough times. Makes me wonder. There you go, if anyone’s listening, there’s a PhD in there maybe, perhaps. I don’t know. Just sounds a bit interesting to me.

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Anne Doran: PhD gone bad.

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Ben Newsome: So if you had to give some advice to um, you know, a starting-off teacher, or someone starting off in your museum perhaps, what would be some great advice to get them on their way?

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Anne Doran: Hm. First thing is mistakes are a learning for learning. They really only become problematic when you do them two or three times and you still haven’t learned. So I if there is a mistake, you use it as a learning thing, not as a negative thing. You you’ve got to take from it and you realise that, hey, not everything’s going to work perfectly every time, and not beat yourself up about it, but sort of learn from it and move on.

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Anne Doran: The other things I I’ve already alluded to, I’m particularly interested in letting students learn from interactivity and problem-solving and all of those sorts of things. I hate the idea of the old empty vessel, I must fill you up with lots of facts and knowledge. It doesn’t work for anyone, and I just see students get so frustrated with that sort of approach because that’s not how the better learning is, if you know what I’m trying to say.

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Anne Doran: Everyone needs to talk and explain the the project and the process, but there is a time where you actually just need to be quiet and let the students go for it and just be there more as a mentor or a coach and then bring them back in and explain their learning and things. I I hate the whole idea of the you must sit and listen to me for 45 minutes and then you have two minutes to do your activity and then that’s it. I’m I’m not a big believer in that.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah. I know I totally agree. I was just the reason I said yeah in that way was I was just thinking of I had some brilliant teachers in my day as I went through school, though I’m aware of a couple that yeah might as well just be watching TV.

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Anne Doran: Yeah, pretty much, and I I really don’t I don’t agree with that approach at all.

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Ben Newsome: It’s pretty outdated. I mean, I’m not even sure that I mean it’s on the way out. I’d imagine that you know give us 10, 20 years, it’ll be almost unheard of hopefully in schools.

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Anne Doran: Hopefully. Definitely. Yeah we’ve recently just undertaken a big project where we’ve got students in America and Australia working on project-based learning to create their own resource around a particular topic, the war and peace in the Pacific. And some of the students have actually they have to basically they were told their topic and they had to come up with their own perspective on it. The stuff that the students have actually come up with because they’ve been allowed to just take a project and run with it, they even had to edit the content, find their own resources, everything. The stuff that they come up with, I was in tears by the time I saw one of them because they had just hit the nail on the head and they were so amazing. And I think a lot of people don’t give kids enough credit. You know, they they’re incredibly creative if um we just have to let them fly a little bit. I know it sounds ridiculous me saying that, but…

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Ben Newsome: No, it’s not. There’s been a consistent theme. I mean Isabelle Kingsley talked about it on episode two I believe, I think Education Change Makers the following episode said the same thing. It really is the case, students have a brain and they want to use it.

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Anne Doran: Yeah. Um and they’re definitely learning the way their way that they’re learning is completely different. And although they’re very more advanced with technology than what probably even myself, I’m I’m happy to say that I’m a technology as a second language, but I don’t they don’t necessarily have the information literacy that goes with it. You know, they they know how to do stuff but they don’t really understand the stuff that they’re doing. So I’m a big believer in information literacy as well, being an ex-teacher librarian, of course. They they can Google something, but they don’t really understand what they’ve Googled, if you know what I mean?

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Ben Newsome: Well that’s right. Trying to refine like is this resource actually important or not?

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Anne Doran: Yeah, and and being able to put it into their own words as well. So that’s a big that’s a big bugbear of mine as well.

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Ben Newsome: Yeah, I just do you um like you said about the war in the Pacific as a as a, you know, project learning, do you connect up with other maritime museums? Because a couple cross my mind straight away, there’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space one out of New York, there’s the Mariners’ Museum in Virginia. I’m even thinking about the World War II, the National World War II Museum as well, I think out in Texas.

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Anne Doran: For this project we we didn’t, however, as part of the culminating event for this project, is they um two ambassadors will actually be going to Hawaii, going to the Missouri and sitting at the table where they signed the peace declaration and creating their own friendship um ceremony and taking that um, we’re webstreaming it by the way, in December. But so they they’re basically going to take the footsteps of the history. So they’re going to Pearl Harbour where it all started and then finishing on the Missouri. So we are sort of getting involved with other museums to actually help us with this process. And hopefully from this year we’ll be able to take it further and get other museums involved with what we’re doing.

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Ben Newsome: Awesome. And then there’ll probably be some lead schools that can take the lead on that too. And actually that brings up the point actually, I mean if people wanted to get involved, how could they get in touch with you?

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Anne Doran: Uh, definitely. Um, so I’m at the obviously Australian National Maritime Museum. I can be flicked an email through um my name, so Anne Doran, anne.doran@anmm.gov.au. I know, I always say Australian National Maritime Museum, anmm, I always stumble. But I also have a direct number if someone really does desperately need to speak to me, and that’s 9298 3626.

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Ben Newsome: Throw an 02 on that and if you’re overseas put +61 in front of it as well.

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Anne Doran: Yes.

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Ben Newsome: No worries. What we’ll do is we’ll um we’ll hook you up on the show notes as well so people can definitely get in touch with it and more link across to your website which is quite in-depth as well.

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Anne Doran: Yay, that that would be great. And um yeah.

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Ben Newsome: It’s pretty cool too. Yeah, it’s good fun. And look, thank you very much for taking time out of your day. I mean there’s a lot going on, especially as we really get into the real meat of the year. Real, it is.

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Anne Doran: Very, very, very busy.

[00:30:26]
Ben Newsome: Yeah. And actually just out of interest because I know that you had a lot on, what’s been going on for you in the last week or two? Because you’ve had so much going on.

[00:30:33]
Anne Doran: Um, so the last two weeks we’ve um basically done around 5,000 students who’ve who’ve come to the museum either virtually or on-site, as well as um teachers and adults because we’ve had a a major exhibition on Pompeii. And we’ve had basically the rockstar of Herculaneum, um Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill come in and he gave six different talks. So we um did two video conferences, a webstream and two symposiums as well as a teacher talk. And then last week, Jeff decided that, “Hey, let’s do a Roman Festival.” So we had two days of Roman Festival, so that was about 800 kids coming in and doing hands-on activities, like bread making, watching gladiators, so um mosaic making, graffiti such as in the Roman way. Yeah, just lots and lots of different activities as well as going through the um exhibition. So it’s been a little bit of a tiring couple of weeks. But obviously um the feedback that we’ve had has been so positive that it’s it’s heartening. I think my favourite piece of feedback was I was walking with this big boofy year 11 boy who would make three of me, and he he was walking along next to me and he said, “This has been good.” I went, “Oh, that’s great,” and he goes, “Yeah, I get it.” I went, “Oh, you get what?” and he went, “Yeah, I get it. I really get it now.” He said, “I didn’t get it before you came here.” And I went, “Oh, okay,” and he goes, “I’m coming back. I’m going to come back to the museum and have a better look.” And I thought, there’s a win.

[00:32:19]
Ben Newsome: That’s a huge win. That’s a massive win. And I just sort of thought, he didn’t have to say that to me. I wasn’t um canvassing his ideas or opinions or something, but to actually say it, I mean obviously I’m the way that he spoke was not that he was like one of these straight-A students. He was a student that wouldn’t necessarily come to a museum, and I just sort of thought, that’s a win.

[00:32:41]
Ben Newsome: That’s a huge win because I know that the museum-going public is only a segment of the greater society and constantly these programmes and all these different things that go out to different museums tend to be to the same choir. It’s kind of nice if um someone who could easily be turned off by museums go, “Yeah, I get it.” That’s a good thing.

[00:33:00]
Anne Doran: Yeah, I know. I just I just I could have bottled him, I tell you. He was just he and like I said, he didn’t have to say anything to me, but you know, he obviously felt that he needed to come and tell me that he enjoyed his stay. And that to me, of all of the kids, I mean don’t get me wrong, we had a lot of positive feedback, but that particular one really struck me because he was a sort of kid that I used to teach, and I just sort of thought, yes, we won!

[00:33:28]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s awesome. And on that note, I feel that I really shouldn’t be keeping you too long because you’ve got more wins to make this week as well. Um, look, thanks again very much again Anne Doran for coming along into the Fizzics Ed podcast and have a fantastic afternoon.

[00:33:46]
Anne Doran: Not a problem. And thank you so much Ben for for creating these podcasts. I’m I’m hoping that some of the teachers will find them useful.

[00:33:53]
Ben Newsome: Oh we certainly do. And uh and of course everyone, just leave your feedback, we’ll certainly read them. Much appreciated Anne.

[00:33:58]
Anne Doran: Okay, thank you!

[00:33:59]
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 Fizzics spelled F-I-double-Z-I-C-S and click 100 free experiments.

[00:34:18]
Ben Newsome: Well there you go, that’s Anne Doran from Australia’s National Maritime Museum. Aren’t they doing great stuff to get the public and students involved in their museum? Everything from Pompeii exhibits through to getting NASA’s chief administrator to come out to speak with the public. I reckon that’s awesome. And look, if you get a chance to pop on down to Darling Harbour in the centre of Sydney, there is this great museum with a bunch of warships and old boats and things surrounding it just down near the water there, you’ll see it. And it’s really worth popping in and I know my kids really love checking out that place.

[00:34:56]
Ben Newsome: So I’d like to just cover three things that certainly grabbed my attention and perhaps they might have grabbed your attention too. So number one, and this is one that really grabbed my attention very much so, was when Anne said there is a time when you just need to be quiet. And isn’t that true? When you’re teaching kids, let students go for it and just be their mentor and a coach. Look, this is very much a theme that you can see coming through education in leaps and bounds these days and for me it’s front and centre when it comes to teaching kids because kids just want to explore, they really, really do. And that’s a good thing that certainly came up in this interview and I must say it’s come up as a recurring theme on interviews in the past as well.

[00:35:43]
Ben Newsome: And speaking of students exploring, number two for me was go and explore yourself. Go to your local museum. And if you’re lucky enough to be near a maritime museum, go check it out. You’d be surprised, it’s not just about the maritime, even though you might clearly think it might be, and I can understand why, I’ve often felt the same way. It’s about transport, not just goods but history and culture around the world and what was going on on those ships to be able to make stuff happen. If you can’t have a chance to jump over to a maritime museum or any museum for that fact, see if you can connect with them virtually. I know Anne Doran does a lot of video conferencing to schools and libraries and whatnot across Australia, and I’m sure you would be able to get in touch with her to be able to connect with her if you can’t get down to the Australian National Maritime Museum. It’ll be well worth your effort.

[00:36:31]
Ben Newsome: And finally, in your teaching, see if you can weave as much history and culture and science together. I mean very much you see so many different acronyms these days about how we could be teaching with STEM or is it STEAM or is it STREAM or whatever it is that you want to call it. Basically, integrating different disciplines into a lesson means that it’s more rich and kids get more out of it. So there you go, that’s my three learnings and I’d love to hear what you’ve got in mind too.

[00:36:59]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed podcast! Love your science? We do too. Here’s this episode’s Education Tip of the Week. Grab your pencil and get ready to make some notes.

[00:37:11]
Ben Newsome: Yes, this week I’d love to talk about another way of getting your science classroom to really sing. And in this case, I really want to just go into the heart of how STEM or STEAM lessons can be taught in a way that is really valid to how the world works outside of schooling. And in this case I’m talking about the Engineering Design Process. You might have heard of the Engineering Design Process with the acronym EDP, but really it just comes down to how engineers think when it comes to designing things for real-world applications. And it’s a bit of a cycle and you’ll see, I must admit, different diagrams and flowcharts on the web, that’s certainly the case. And in this case, I really just wanted to simplify how the Engineering Design Process can work as a bit of a conceptual idea for kids to sort of evaluate are they sort of really thinking carefully about what they’re trying to achieve?

[00:38:05]
Ben Newsome: So there are several steps. So number one is identify the need and the constraints of the problem. Fairly obvious, but kids really need to know what do they need to be doing and what are the constraints of that thing that they should be doing. Number two, research the problem. What is the background knowledge around the problem that could maybe help them out when they create their prototype of whatever it is they’re going to try and build to create a solution. And speaking of solutions, number three, imagine possible solutions, not just one. Get out some butcher paper, get out a whiteboard, get out a chalkboard, just get out something and just throw down ideas for a good five minutes or so just write down as much stuff as they could be doing and it can be even completely outlandish, let their minds run free. And then move on to step four, which is once you’ve chosen a given solution for a particular problem that they’re going to try and solve, is they need to plan their steps out accordingly.

[00:39:03]
Ben Newsome: Number five, build that prototype for their solution that they’re going to build, that’s probably a good idea, they’re going to have to build it, not just have it on paper. So definitely do that. And number six, once they’ve built the thing, test it. Evaluate it. Make sure that the prototype, the very first thing that they made, is doing what they thought it was going to do in the first place. And critically, seven, improve and redesign the prototype. Fix it up, make it better. And you know what? Come full circle, come all the way back to the start and go back to the initial question, what were the needs and the constraints. And this engineering design process is almost circular, it can go round and round and round again. So identify, research, imagine, plan, build, test and improve. If your kids can be doing that, they really are emulating what happens in the real world and I tell you what, your STEM lessons will certainly be better.

[00:40:01]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed podcast. We’re excited about science! Grab a copy of our new book, Be Amazing: How to Teach Science the Way Primary Kids Love, from our website. Just search Be Amazing book. It’s available in hardcopy and ebook. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s Fizzics spelled F-I-double-Z-I-C-S.

[00:40:22]
Ben Newsome: Yes, and you can certainly find out more about the Engineering Design Process if you jump on the Fizzics Ed website, so fizzicseducation.com.au, and type in Engineering Design Process or engineering or design or process, one of those three, and you will find a blog article which goes into this in more detail. And just thinking further, Anne Doran talked about the idea of kids having time to spend with the content themselves, whatever you might be teaching, and then coming back to you later where you can mentor them and teach them and get them to go further with their knowledge. Let them digest stuff first before they come to you. And in the last week’s interview with Jan Zanetis, she talked quite a bit about flipped learning. And I wanted to listen to a bit about what that’s all about.

[00:41:06]
Jan Zanetis: Basically where the teachers create the lesson on video using, you know, you can use your iPhone or whatever to record yourself teaching the lesson. So the students view the lesson, the content that they have to learn, outside of the classroom, so at the library, at home, on the bus, wherever, and then when they come back to the classroom, they can use that time for more higher-order activities like building projects or doing group work together. So the sky’s the limit because you can really take advantage of this model to get the content out of the way so you can do the really impactful things during classroom time.

[00:41:51]
Ben Newsome: Yes, and if you want to find a bit more about flipping your classroom, it’s well worth your time reading the book, Flip Your Classroom, written by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. It’s published by International Society for Technology in Education, so ISTE for short. Go and check out Flip Your Classroom and it certainly could help you out. And if you want to just check out a bit more of what Jan Zanetis has to say about using video in your classroom, she is a global expert in this. I kid you not, it’s well worth it, and it’s on last week’s episode on the Fizzics Ed podcast, so definitely check that out.

[00:42:24]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed podcast! Sign up now for our fortnightly email newsletter. It’s loaded with details on new experiments you can do, STEM teaching articles, new gadgets, exclusive offers and upcoming events. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au, scroll to the bottom and add your email.

[00:42:43]
Ben Newsome: And that almost brings us to the end of this episode. Look, there’s still more to be had, jump on our website, spelled really badly, F-I-double-Z-I-C-S education.com.au and you will find lots and lots of support resources that are freely available. Seriously, there’s heaps, of several hundred articles and free experiments and things to keep you involved, certainly. And hey, next week, we are talking with Corrina Straker from Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum in Michigan to find out what happens in a children’s museum, you know all sorts of stuff like water play and little hands-on activities that the kids get to do. It’s very, very cool and she’s heavily involved in video conferencing to run virtual excursions all around the globe. It’s certainly worth your time. And look, if you’ve been enjoying these podcasts please leave a review on your favourite podcast provider because it lets other people know that hey maybe it’s worth checking out, and that’ll certainly help us out. And by the way, if you’ve got any feedback I’d love to hear about it too, that will certainly help us no end. And look, as always, may your science lessons be fun, please make them informative and make sure they’re grabbing your students’ imagination. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome, from Fizzics Education, and of course you’ve been listening to the Fizzics Ed podcast. Catch you next week!

[00:43:57]
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.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why was Captain Cook’s voyage on the Endeavour considered a scientific mission?
While the voyage eventually involved exploration, it began as a mission to solve the problem of longitude and latitude by recording the Transit of Venus from Tahiti. The ship carried a dedicated science crew, including renowned botanist Joseph Banks and experts in biology and astronomy, to record new species and perform detailed cartography of the Australian East Coast.

How did Captain Cook manage to prevent scurvy among his crew during the voyage?
Cook trialled the use of sauerkraut to provide Vitamin C to his crew. Because the sailors initially found the taste unappealing, he used reverse psychology by serving it only to the officers and “gentlemen.” This made the crew desire the food, leading them to eat it and successfully avoiding the mass outbreaks of scurvy common on other long-distance voyages.

What can students learn about chemistry at the Australian National Maritime Museum?
The museum offers a popular programme focused on “Shipwrecks, Corrosion and Conservation.” Students explore oxidation and reduction reactions, the science behind corrosion in marine environments, and the desalination processes used to preserve historical artefacts like the Sirius anchor.

How do submarines help teach the principles of physics?
Submarines provide a practical look at buoyancy and how massive metal objects can be made to float or sink. The museum compares the mechanics of a submarine to the biology of a turtle to help students understand the physics of movement and displacement within the water.

What is Anne Doran’s “smile metric” for career choices?
Anne shares that when deciding to move into museum education, she followed her husband’s advice to consider where she “smiled the most.” She found that while she loved teaching, the museum environment provided a higher level of stimulation and the opportunity to interact with a wider variety of students through diverse, hands-on programmes.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Gap Between Technology and Information Literacy
Educators often note that while modern students are “digital natives” who are highly proficient with devices, they frequently lack information literacy. This involves the ability to critically evaluate whether a digital resource is credible and the skill to synthesise information into their own words. Discussion should focus on how we can move beyond teaching “how to use a tool” toward teaching “how to understand the data” the tool provides.

Moving from “Empty Vessel” to “Mentor”
A recurring theme in the interview is the importance of the “quiet” educator. Instead of the traditional model where a teacher lectures for the majority of a session, there is a powerful benefit to letting students explore, make mistakes, and problem-solve independently. How can formal schooling environments better adapt to this “coach” model, and what are the challenges of stepping back to let students lead their own discovery?

Cross-Curricular Synergy in STEM
The museum’s success in combining history with science—such as studying volcanoes through the lens of Pompeii or botany through the voyage of the Endeavour—suggests that science is most engaging when it is anchored in a narrative. Reflecting on how to weave culture, history, and science together can make lessons more “rich,” helping students see that these disciplines do not exist in isolation in the real world.