About Planet SciCast

Planet SciCast is four things:

  1. A competition to get children, young people, teachers, parents, science communicators and science/engineering/technology professionals all making short films about practical science.
  2. A web resource of all those movies (plus write-ups of the activities, experiments and demonstrations), for the use and amusement of everyone involved, but particularly for schools.
  3. A platform for other science engagement projects to share their work with a wider audience.
  4. Finally, a discussion about who’s job it is to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with entertaining science related material.

Why you should get involved

Making films is creative, fun, absorbing, and tremendously rewarding. It can also be complicated and frustrating – but it turns out that it's easier to make films about science and engineering than it is about other subjects. We have a huge history of practical experiments and demonstrations that provide the perfect starting points for short films.

Young people often already have the technical skills to record and edit video, and the technology is getting simpler and more streamlined all the time. SciCast is about turning the growing excitement around making films, to practical, collective benefit.

We're trying to build the world's most entertaining science resource, featuring contributions from primary schools, secondary schools, families, scout and guide groups, science visitor centres, professional scientists... anyone who wants to join in and help out.

Through this, we want to encourage as many young people as possible to experience science as a practical subject – what NESTA, our principle backer, calls 'Real Science'.

Where to start

Have a browse through some of the terrific films we've already published, to get a feel for the sort of thing we're after. We've a broad mix of entertainment and education, straightforward and silly, repeatable and plain ridiculous.

If you like to join in, read up on how to submit a film, download our handbook for some advice on how to start, and follow the blog for ideas, inspiration, and news.

The submission deadline for the 2009 Awards is 9th January 2009. Films received after that date will be held over until the 2010 Awards.

Why Planet SciCast started

Generations of children grew up with television shows like Johnny Ball's, How and its successor How2, and more recent series like It'll Never Work and The Big Bang. These programmes are no more, and the sort of science and engineering inspiration they represented is no longer available through children's television.

In 2006, TV producer Jonathan Sanderson brought the idea for SciCast to NESTA, as a way of providing similar inspiration, but starting from a clean sheet of paper. Media can now be more active and involving than television: how does that affect the way we inspire our children and young people?

SciCast is the result of the discussions that followed; it continues to evolve as we learn more.

Partners and supporters

From the beginning, SciCast seemed like an ideal fit with the existing audience for NESTA’s Planet Science, and also an ideal project on which to partner with the Engineering and Technology Board (ETB), who are now responsible for this website and for the science and technology news and careers site Scenta.

The Physics part of the competition is supported by the Institute of Physics, and is run as a regional competition feeding into the national project.

Additional partners will be announced shortly. This is usually code for 'we'd like more people to join us', and while that's absolutely true we really do have more partners and supporters already involved. We're just not quite ready to tell everyone who they are yet!

The mission of NESTA is to increase the UK’s capacity for innovation. Planet Science is part of the Future Innovators Team, which exists to spur development of the skills and attributes for innovation in young people. Science is a subject which automatically develops some of those skills.

Find out more about our supporters here.

Any questions?

Please contact scicast@nesta.org.uk