Question: What would you do with the prize money?

Lucien Heurtier answered on 30 Mar 2023: last edited 30 Mar 2023 12:30 pm

Thanks for asking! I’m actually super excited about this, as it’s been something I thought about since quite some years and never got a chance to do it. I would like to use such a prize to fund an outreach event which I called :

‘Painting the Universe’

The idea is simple:

– Go to classrooms in elementary schools and high schools and talk for about an hour to students about the Universe. I would explain to them how big it is, and what we can observe in it. I would show them some of these beautiful pictures that have been recently taken by the James Web Space Telescope, explain to them what they show, and tell them exciting stories about the cosmos, that they will for sure remember.

– Get students involved by asking them to volunteer to do little human-size experiments. (use a ball and an elastic to understand the gravitational attraction, use a bike pump to see that pressure induces heat when a star forms, etc.)

– Then, provide pupils with painting material (canvas, brushes, and acrylic paint, which is mainly what I need the funding for) so that they can paint what they find the most beautiful about the Universe. A rocket? A shooting star? A galaxy cluster? An astronaut? Whatever makes them excited. I would show on the wall pictures of different kinds, and they will have to paint what they imagine ‘their’ Universe to look like. Each student will then have to explain what they painted and what they see in their painting.

– Let them come back home with their own painting of the Universe on a real canvas so that they can show and explain to their parents and siblings what they have understood about it.

Such an event has three main objectives:

– Make young students excited about how ‘beautiful’ science can be;

– Make them realize that they can understand, with their own words and pictures, what happens in our Universe;

– Let them picture their own ‘vision’ of the Universe by painting it, and most importantly, bring this vision back home, with them, on a canvas that they may look at regularly while growing up, thinking ‘this got me excited once’…

The region where I live has a very low rate of pupils ending up studying STEM after they leave school. The only way to make a change is to fire young people’s imagination about science. I do believe that astrophysics is a powerful topic to achieve this goal, as it manipulates objects that are visually fascinating and can be described in terms that any young person can understand without too much effort.

I am thrilled that the “I’m a Scientist” event could help me implement this project! I really hope that you can vote to support this project!