In our increasingly high-tech society, forecasts suggest that up to eight in ten jobs of the future will require these skills. Simply put, science means jobs for the future.
Despite this, the popularity of these subjects is on the slide. The fact is students choosing these subjects has hit a 20-year low.
The Shell Questacon Science Circus is one visible way Shell can take its enthusiasm for science to the field. In a conscious effort to ensure students from regional Australia don’t miss out, the science circus travels to country towns.
“We know that we can open people’s minds to the relevance and application of science to everyday life,” says Questacon’s Deputy Director, Science and Learning, Dr Bobby Cerini.
“There’s so much more available to city kids than country kids, and if you’re remote or very remote, it’s even more difficult.
“So, one of the ways to overcome that is to get programs out into the community,” she says.
Dr Cerini says teachers report a spike in students’ interest in science around the time a circus visit comes to town.
“You can see engagement as it’s happening in real time with the science circus. And we know from anecdotal experience that students do get inspired by the experiences with the circus, whether it’s the shows or the exhibition, and then select STEM subjects and then go on to study science degrees,” she says.
Megan Danslow, a science, maths and biology teacher at Chinchilla State High School, aims to make science accessible for students, too.
“We try to link things into the real world as much as possible, to get students seeing science where possible through videos, or experiments or the real world, and then getting them to come up with questions and, going from there, then trying to answer those questions,” she says.
At Miles State High School, science course coordinator Grace Laudon says her school’s emphasis is trying to get students interested in science-related subject in middle school particularly, so that students will carry on with science subjects in final years and beyond.
“If we can get that key interest early on…they’ll have no problems applying what they’ve learned here to the jobs they might go into later in life,” she says. “We’re trying to give them the basic skills they need to be able to do what they want to do when they get older.”
As a technology-based company that has been innovating for more than a century, Shell’s partnership with Questacon seeks to help a new generation of students and teachers build the skills and confidence to take on these subjects.