Meet a Researcher

The service “Meet a Researcher” is breaking down boundaries between schools, universities and research institutes, and also making the profession of a researcher more familiar to pupils and students. The coordinator of the service matches enrolled schools and researcher with each other. Researchers’ school visits will be made as easy as possible, regardless of geography or financial resources.

The purpose of the service is to make researchers’ school visits as easy as possible, regardless of geography or financial resources.

Schools and teachers may enrol to the service by filling in the enrolment forms in which questions, such as the preferred topic of researcher’s visit and the age of pupils/students, are asked. Researchers enrol to the service with another enrolment form in which they tell, e.g. their field and topic of research. In the next phase, the coordinator of the service matches enrolled schools and researchers with each other. The researcher and the school will get each other’s contact information and agree on a suitable schedule and other details related to the visit.

The service is funded by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Breakdown boundaries between schools, universities and research institutes, and also making the profession of a researcher more familiar to pupils and students.

The service is an interesting example of utilizing information and communication technology for increasing the regional equality of STEAM education.

Meet a Researcher was copied and modified (with permission) from a service called “Skype a Scientist” (https://www.skypeascientist.com/) to fit the concept in Finland. However, Meet a Researcher added humanities and social sciences areas to the model.

Students/pupils participate by preparing questions for the researcher before the meeting.

Students/pupils learn new things and aspects regarding different disciplines and a profession of researcher. For the researcher, the service provides an easy channel to take part in science education and to network with teachers around the country.

The service focuses on children from age 7. However, the same researcher may meet different age groups and share those experiences with students/pupils and teacher.

The service accepts Finnish, English and Swedish speaking teachers, students/pupils and researchers.

The service respects user’s privacy and offers the official information protection form based on the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) articles 12 and 13.

The service invites researchers from many different disciplines such as climate research, biosciences, physics, history and linguistics.

The integration of scientific and practical knowledge from different disciplines comes with the researchers who enrol to the service and meet schools. Furthermore, there is no reason why two or more researchers with different professional experiences couldn’t meet the school during the same lesson.

Teachers are responsible for preparing pedagogically and didactically reasonable questions with students
/pupils before the meeting. The researcher prepares the lesson after receiving the pupils/student’s questions from the teacher. Besides, researchers are allowed to use more expertise by showing short demos and other “extras”, but they are not mandatory.

Finland is a country with long distances, and that’s why it’s often challenging for schools to get researchers to visit schools physically. For that reason, the service makes researchers’ school visits as easy as possible, regardless of the location of a school.

The service developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finnish National Agency for Education, and the Academy of Finland.

Visits are carried out via Skype or via some other video chat service.

I do not have personal experiences of using the service yet, but according to the User Experience video: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly3GMEiWhTY) the cooperation between partners usually proceeds very well without problems.

Researchers enrol to the service with an enrolment form in which they tell e.g. their field and topic of research. After that, a researcher agrees with the teacher about the date and time of the virtual visit. The researcher prepares the lesson after receiving the pupils/student’s questions from the teacher. Finally, the researcher participates to the lesson as a virtual visitor.

Schools/teachers and researchers are asked filling out in the feedback form once the virtual visit is over.

At the moment, there is a User experience video which describes the learning process of students/pupils, teachers and researchers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly3GMEiWhTY