Stories

Jackie  Bondell is the Senior Education and Outreach Manager for the Australian Research Council's Centres of Excellence for Dark Matter, Particle Physics and OzGrav. An astrophysicist and educator, she develops programs that connect teachers, students, and researchers through authentic, curriculum-aligned science experiences. Jackie leads national and international initiatives, including the Dark Matter Partner Schools program and the HERA balloon-based research project, engaging schools in real-world physics investigations. She also provides science communication training for early-career researchers. Her work focuses on inclusion, innovation, and empowering educators to bring frontier physics into classrooms across Australia and beyond.

Vicky Hall is the Engagement Manager at STFC RAL Space, running the public, school, community and stakeholder engagement and outreach programme. Her background is in Astrophysics, having graduated in 2018 with MPhys Physics and Astronomy from Durham University. She also has teaching experience and a flair for languages (German, Spanish, French, Russian) which led her to pursue working abroad and spending a year in the Netherlands with the European Space Agency as a Young Graduate Trainee for Didactics related to Space Technology. There she worked in the Education Office developing resources, student projects in programming, robotics, physics and rocketry, and teacher trainings for schools across Europe, using space as the context to teach STEM.

Her experience collaborating with space sector colleagues and astronauts including Tim Peake and Alexander Gerst motivated her to return to the UK to bring back and develop best practices in STEM outreach and education. Over 6.5 years at RAL Space, she has developed a strategic outreach programme that reaches thousands of people every year and supports those from underserved communities in STEM.

Her ultimate goal is to improve STEM education, making it accessible to all children and do so with inspiration from our solar system, the Milky Way, and beyond.

Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Vice Principal and Clerk of Senate, and is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration: the global team that made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015 – a discovery that was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Martin is currently Vice-President (Public Engagement) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and from 2021-2025 chaired the RSE’s Learned Societies Group on Scottish STEM Education. He is a long-standing and passionate advocate for outreach to schools and public audiences and in 2015 he was awarded the MBE for his services to the public understanding of science.

Remote3 has introduced the pupils to robotics and coding. It has developed both interest and skills in these fields as well as helping to develop teamwork and communication between the pupils. The pupils are always greatly inspired by the reality that their robot, of their own design and build, is transported down into the Boulby mine to be tested in the Mars yard. Given the scientific importance and research history of the Boulby laboratory this enables the pupils to briefly be part of a professional environment involved in space research. It cannot be overstated how important an experience this is for the pupils. This connection also signposts potential future career pathways into similar fields within science and engineering, helping to develop science and technological innovation for the future. 

In addition to this, the Remote3 project provides the pupils with a practical experience that cannot be replicated in the normal school environment. Not only do they need to design and test their robot; they must plan to send their robot to a remote location, taking conditions in that location into account. They must also prepare code that can be clearly understood by remote operators and present their solution to an unfamiliar audience. All of this provides very valuable project based learning which has a big impact on the pupils when undertaken in conjunction with external agencies such as Edinburgh University and Boulby Laboratory. 

"Inverurie Academy has thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the Remote3 challenge. We hope that we can be involved with this challenge in future years to come.”

Initially, there were challenges with getting the app on students iPads, when we first joined in 2023. We are a one-to-one device school, but getting the app on to the iPads took longer than expected. We were sent an iPad to overcome this which was a huge help. The Remote3 team is so great at helping with anything like that, or sourcing specific Lego parts that are needed.  

The resources and guidance from Edinburgh University are great and the opportunity for the students to test their rovers underground at Boulby is always such an exciting day. It gives the students such a boost and something unique and interesting to talk about; it is such an inspiring project to be involved in.  

Finding time for the team to meet, when I am also free, can be a challenge but one that is worth doing. It could be run as a lunch or after school club though. 

If you were thinking about getting involved, I would highly recommend it; the resources are excellent and clear, and the mentors are so helpful. You don't even need to know anything about the coding software before you start (or ever, depending on how involved with the challenges you want to be!), you can learn alongside the students. As a way to engage students and build their confidence, it is brilliant. 

"One of our teams presented what they'd done at a local STEM event, seeing them so animated and proud was fantastic."