Amanda Mathieson
Education and Public Engagement Manager , University College Dublin
Amanda is a passionate advocate of combining the arts and sciences for impactful engagement with broad audiences. Her speciality is the design of STEM escape rooms but her interests also lie in other science games, theatre, comedy, storytelling and festivals. She has managed several EU projects focused on combining the arts with STEM, including STEAM Summer School, an intensive course that trains researchers and scicomm professionals to communicate STEM through the Arts. She continues to run STEAM Summer school annually in Malta and also leads the Generation Glas programme, an SFI Discover funded project to develop underprivileged youth into sustainable champions. Amanda has worked as a public engagement professional for 7 years across various institutions in Europe, including University of Malta, Imperial College London and the University of Manchester. She is currently the Public Engagement Manager of BiOrbic Research Centre at University College Dublin.
Sessions
Designing STEM Escape Rooms for Public Engagement
Escape rooms are a form of entertainment that have exploded in popularity in the last decade. Players enter a room and must solve puzzles in order to escape within a time limit. As such, this format lends itself very well to public engagement with science. Escape rooms create fun, immersive environments where members of the public are motivated to understand even complex science in order to beat the clock. I have spent the last 6 years designing and running escape rooms in both Malta and Ireland, evaluating their potential and impact. In this talk, I will focus on the benefits and challenges of STEM escape rooms, as well as my tips for how to design them well.