Get your idea off the ground with these Top Tips! Don’t forget to tell us about it in our Call for Ideas so we can help promote and support your event.
Consider basics like health and safety, logistics, marketing and evaluating success well in advance, will make your event more enjoyable, effective and successful.
Once you’ve got an idea of what you’d like to do, first things first: always do a risk assessment.
If you’re doing an activity, do a test run to make sure you’ve covered off all Health and Safety requirements, and make sure you’ve got time to make any adjustments or get more kit if you need to before the actual event. Where will you be, where will your audience be, and how will people move round your event?
Do you need extra pairs of hands to welcome people, take tickets, manage crowds or help with quick turnovers? What happens if someone needs first aid? How will you record how fantastic the audience thought your event was, or how you can improve it? It’s worth bearing in mind all of these factors beforehand.
If you need any further guidance on logistics, get in touch with us at info@mathsweek.scot.
Think about the cost of your event, whether you need additional funding, or whether there will be a charge to attend.
It’s worth bearing in mind whether you need to pay for venue hire, marketing, travel/speaker fees or consumables, but don’t let that put you off. Look if there are any grants you could apply to, to help with costs associated with putting on an event.
You might also want to consider charging for your event. This can be more appropriate for some audiences than others, and may affect who attends, but could be a way of recouping any costs. If you do not charge for your event, think about how you will be able to judge interest levels and how many people will be coming.
Ticket sales aren’t guaranteed, so you should always plan for all eventualities when considering costs for running events.
Think about how much space you require, whether your venue has everything you need or are there some constraints that you need to consider.
Are you planning to launch rockets or projectiles (safely) into the air? How messy is your activity? Do people need to be close enough to see the activity for it to be effective? Will you want any Audio Visual elements including displaying a presentation and does your venue allow for that? Will you need a microphone for large spaces and does the venue have those facilities?
It’s worth bearing all of these factors in mind when deciding on a venue for your event, and considering any potential limiting factors in your risk assessment right from the start.
Promoting your event doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming.
Using social media or low cost marketing tools can be a great way of advertising your event. You can upload details of your event to the Maths Week Scotland website for free, and can tag the Maths Week Scotland twitter account (@mathsweekscot) so we can share your event.
We also have a range of poster templates where you can drop in your event details, print off and then distribute in order to promote your event locally. Local shops, schools, supermarkets and many other community venues have noticeboards where you can advertise events, normally for a small fee or for free. Do make sure you check with any venue before posting, and please don’t fly post anywhere without prior permission.
Reach out to local contacts to see if you can collaborate on venues, speakers or event costs.
Got a great idea but don’t know where to host it, how much it’d cost or who could help? Why not reach out to other collaborators in your area to discuss options.
We strongly encourage collaborators to explore dates that might suit multiple venues/schools/groups especially when bringing in external providers to make best use of time, money and resource.
Alternatively, get in touch and we can flag up potential partners/collaborators or clashes where you might want to discuss options that work for all parties, and for your audience.
It’s worth sense-checking your language with a small pilot audience before you go live.
Using the right level of language can mean the difference between stunning or stumping your audience! The more experience we have of a subject, the more jargon or complex terminology we are likely to use, and it’s really easy to forget that an unfamiliar individual word can lose an audience completely.
Thinking about the language you use e.g. ‘curve’ or ‘parabola’ and whether a simpler (but equally correct) word would make your content accessible to as wide an audience as possible is always worth doing.
When doing a talk or activity for adults it is worth remembering some of them may not have used mathematical language since school days so getting someone outside of your field of expertise or of the right age group to sense check your words / pilot an activity can also be really useful.
Most importantly, go for it!
We love both new and bold or tried and tested ideas for Maths Week Scotland, and we are here to support you to make it a reality!
It's Spring in Edinburgh means, which means the return of the Edinburgh Science Festival (30 March - 14 April)! This years theme is Shaping the Future, and we've browsed through the programme to pick out some of our maths highlights for you.
To mark World Meteorological Day (23 March), we are delighted to share a guest post from Professor Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the Royal Meteorological Society, to introduce their new Climate Change Concept tool and show how teachers can use it to support maths in the curriculum.
