2010
Science Communication for Global Talents– Overseas Internship –Report■ General information
Student’s name

Zhang Jifang
M 1Affiliation ・grade

Graduate school of Tokyo Institute of Technology
Department of International Development Engineering

Organization / postat organization
Person in charge atorganization
schedule

Science Museum
Arjinder Nirwal
From 6th September to 14th September【Notes】※ 1 Change the size of the boxes if necessary. Also Delete "Summary" as appropriate.
※ 2 This report will be publicized on the website http://sec-titech.jp/report/cate04/ forreference.
※ 3 You may insert pictures in this report. Make sure, however, you get consent from theorganization in advance.
※ 4 Send the report to the person in charge at the internship organization to get it
checked before you submit it. Let them know it will be publicized on the website. Revise
the text if he/she suggests amendments.
※ 5 Submit both versions of the report to us: the one before 4 and after.
※ 6 Delete these notes in red before you submit.

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■ Summary in Japanese （Summarize the content of the report within 400 words.）■ Summary in English （Summarize the content of the report within 400 words.）■ Objective
My major is about international project planning. In the future, it is necessary to work with people having different
background from different countries. The skill of making communication smoother is required. I chose Science Museum forthe internship for several reasons as below.
First, Science Museum is one of the major museums in England, contains many of the most famous exhibits. It is a
precious opportunity for me to take a close look at this historical museum.
Second, Science Museum has education function for children, and also provides various interactive exhibits for various
participants. Thus, it is a chance for me to communicate with people of different age, education background, and religions
within a short period, and it is also a great opportunity to learn from the museum staff to see how they communicate with theparticipants. For example how they designed the scenarios to explain ideas about science effectively to people who don’t
have background knowledge, and how they give presentations to attract the participants.
Third, I wanted to compare Japanese and Chinese science museums with London Science Museum, to find the differencein the way of science communication, and finally find the problems in my communication skill and improve it.

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■ Detailed schedule（Describe concretely, including what, when and with whom）
In the Science Museum, there are several teams working together, including finance team, marketing team, outreaching
team, etc. The learning team is one of them. Because they are in charge of “communication with audience” we learned a lot
from the learning team members during the internship period.
Part One Sep 6th
On September 6th, the first day of internship started. After greeting to the learning team leader Ms Jin, we attended the firstactivity --- their resource round up meeting. In this meeting, the staff of learning team discussed the resources they developed
recently and the problems they faced. During the discussion, they gave their own opinions and their advices to the otherpeople’s ideas. They don’t deny each other, but always make their own opinions as a plus to the others. The discussion wasefficient and moved very smooth, at least much smoother than Japanese meeting.
After lunch, we attended their Lauch Pad Show, showing simple phenomenon and experiments for children and adults.
The following pictures show the situation of the LP show. The explainer explained in an interesting and easy way to let thechildren understand well, and was very confident to deal with all kinds of happening during the show caused by thevolunteers or the audience. During the show, the explainer asked various questions to lead the audience to think, quite
different from Japan or China, the audience, no matter children or adult, answered actively. Even there were actually a lot of“stupid” answers, the explainer found the good point in this kind of answers and praised them. The most different point wasthat the explainer always used volunteers, even for a little help, and after they helped the explainer always asked the audienceto give a “bravo”. Thus, the audience would get the feeling that they are in the show, playing a part of it, and with theencouragement of “bravo”, they may get a sense of achievement and enjoy the show. After the show, there was a feeling thatthe explainer leaded all the audience to a little trip in the science world.

Volunteers

Picture 1: Explainer in LP ShowPicture 2: Little Volunteer
Picture 3: Adult Volunteer

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The last activity we attended on the first day was there arrangement of “Science communication”, they hold a small
meeting among the learning team staffs discussed how to make science communication go smoother for various audiences.

show■ Results（ Did you achieve the goal originally intended? Any extra achievement, including

awareness/particular skill?.）
For a science museum, to encourage people to like science it is necessary to make a mixture ofscience and art, for us, if we want to explain our idea to the other experts or to the citizens andlet them agree with us, maybe we need to work on the people’s sensibility. Science always makes
people to be rational. People’s reason works to let people think about it and to know about it.
They may only know it , remember it but not really like it. It is important to work on people’s
sensibility to let them move, and then like science, interested in science and want to know more
about science even research on science.
For us, when we work with the expert or the citizen, it is easy to let them know our opinions areright, but if we want them to agree with us totally and support our point of view from heart, it isnecessary to work on their sensibility.

■ Future prospects （How you can make use of your experience in your future career）

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■ Suggestion （Proposal/advice to future interns）

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