Outreach
Science—Visually Speaking By Molly Szpara
I feel no shame admitting that most of my vocabulary skills were learned from watching the television show, Star Trek Voyager, beginning at age five. My mother would allow me to stay up with her on weeknights while she nursed my little sister. I would watch, fascinated, as the characters typed on glowing control panels, charged up the warp-core, and found their ship flung through a temporal anomaly and become quite lost in the time-space continuum. Words like temporal anomaly and time-space continuum made just about as much sense to me as my science and math classes did. I know myself to be a predominantly right-brained person, and I struggled in mandatory classes throughout middle and high school, most especially chemistry, physics, and trigonometry. Every time I thought I had learned something, I froze up on tests and couldn’t recall how to do it. I spent hours
26 Johns Hopkins University Nano-Bio Magazine
looking at note cards and never missed a class, but with no results. My left-brain just hadn’t been exercised early enough. So I basically abandoned trying, and settled for picturing scientists as those who, like the crew of Voyager, played with shiny gadgets and made frothy potions in beakers all day. Science can be made incomprehensible merely by the way it is taught, especially for me. In lectures, the professor may explain something in a way he understands, but to me, the literature student in an intro-level science course, it’s another language entirely. An effective visual can make all the difference, however. That’s why Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology’s initiative to create accessible and comprehensible science videos is genius to me. Peter Searson, director of INBT, explained that the institute is a research-based operation that combines different areas of science, such as engineering, nanotechnology,
imagery by INBT Animation Studio animators