Science and Engineering Festival Gives Brainiac Reputation a MakeoverYahoo Contributor Network
By Carol Bengle Gilbert 1 hour ago
Poster advertises rock stars of science and engineering.
This interview with USA Science & Engineering Festival founder Larry Bock launches a series of interviews with national experts in science, engineering and mathematics who've addressed Washington, D.C., area middle and high school students through the Festival's Nifty Fifty speaker program.
Tell us a little about your background and expertise prior to your founding the USA Science & Engineering Festival.
Prior to founding the festival, I spent most of my career as a high-tech serial entrepreneur, founding, co-founding, or seeding the early-stage growth of over 40 high tech and life sciences companies worth more than $70 billion, 17 of which I conceived of and created from scratch.
What inspired the creation of the festival?
About 2006, I called it quits from the world of entrepreneurship and took my family abroad for fun. I was inspired by a bunch of international science festivals we saw. In 2008, I started the San Diego Science Festival. It was a roaring success, and Ray O Johnson, the CTO [chief technology officer] of our lead sponsor Lockheed Martin, said, that was fun, but why not create a national festival? So, in 2010, we took it to the National Mall.
Why did you choose a festival format?The premise of the festival, the underlying mantra, is society gets what it celebrates. We celebrate Hollywood actors/actresses, pop stars and professional athletes, and we create a generation of wannabes. So, we decided to create the largest celebration of scientists and engineers. The festival is more akin to an art or music festival than a science fair, encouraging celebration of science through lots of hands-on activities but also art, music, theater, film, and comedy. The ultimate reason we did this was that the last couple of companies I started, I couldn't recruit Americans. There weren't enough of them going into these fields. Eighty-five percent of people getting advanced degrees in the physical sciences here are from abroad, and we're not retaining them after they graduate. Unless we can turn this around, as a country we are going to outsource innovation, and then the game is over.
How long until you can judge the success of this effort?
It will be a long time before we can look back and see kids who attended and were inspired to follow a career in science. To get there, we have to make sure this festival is sustainable, that exhibitors return, that we increase participation. We need to create an economic impact so the city wants us to return. We are well on our way to doing this.
Is the festival still growing, or has it reached its pinnacle?
It will never reach its pinnacle. From 2010 to 2012 to the current festival, we've increased every variable by nearly 100 percent each time. We went from 350 exhibitors in 2010 to 650 in 2012 to 1,000 this year. We've seen similar increases in sponsorship and in the size of the Nifty Fifty Program, which has grown from 50 to 100 to 150.
As a testament, we have over 400 new organizations participating this year for the first time The universe of festival participants is vast; the problem is finding a large enough venue. We took over the A, B, and C halls of the Convention Center in 2012; this year we're taking over the D and E halls as well, so we're one of only a handful of events that takes over the whole Washington Convention Center.
We already have 32,000 under-served students signed up for Sneak Peek this year compared to 14,000 last year. [Sneak Peek is an opportunity for schools, home schoolers and military families to visit the festival the day before it opens to the public.] Even though registration isn't required to attend the festival, we allow people to register on the website to say they plan to go, and we already have 15,000 signed up for the weekend.
I was blown away when we opened up the Sneak Peek registration. It happened to be the same day as Obamacare registration opened. We had 15,000 signups on the first day. Obamacare had 300.
What are some of the challenges you've faced in putting this festival together, and how did you overcome them?The first year we were predominantly evangelists since no one really knew what the festival was. The other challenge of holding it on the National Mall that year was dealing with the National Park Service. They preferred reserving the Mall for First Amendment-type events and really didn't want this type of event on the Mall. We worked it out. Our attendance the inaugural year was a half million, according to the National Park Service. But there were a few cynics who said you had nice weather and a lot of people on the Mall as tourists. The second year, the biggest unknown was whether people would go to the Convention Center on a weekend for a science festival. The Convention Center folks said it was their second largest national event. This year, the challenge has been how sequestration might affect the festival. But as of today, we have greater government participation than in the past.
Tell me about the Nifty Fifty…. How does that fit in with the overall festival concept?
There are a couple of different things we're trying to do. We're trying to create role models in science and engineering. We're trying to create a new generation of science role models. When you ask kids to name a scientist, they can usually name Einstein, but when you ask them for a contemporary scientist, they can't think of one. The first time we did this in San Diego, we had some of the best scientists, but they weren't used to communicating with young kids. Now we're focusing on getting people who can talk to kids and inspire them.
This year is the first time in the three years I've been hosting the Nifty Fifty talks that I saw students asking the speakers for autographs.
I can't tell you how excited that makes me. That's the kind of interest we're trying to generate.
Who are some of the notables who've made it into the Nifty Fifty?We've had David Gallo, who discovered the Titanic, Bernard Harris, the first African-American in space, James West, inventor of the electret microphone, to name a few. We've had Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur geniuses, key entrepreneurial visionaries. We had Elon Musk last year.
How do schools go about getting a Nifty Fifty presenter?They apply and indicate a preference. We do our best to match school and speaker. We try to put speakers into schools whose topics match the curriculum, and we try to provide speakers to public schools which otherwise wouldn't be able to get speakers of this caliber.
We're going to be interviewing some of the Nifty Fifty for this article series. The Nifty Fifty program was designed for students, of course, but what do you think the public can learn from the Nifty Fifty interviews?
I'm hoping they come away with the idea that science is involved in every aspect of their lives. Their children should not drop out of studying science just because they don't want to get a degree in science. It's critical today to have an understanding of science for many of our endeavors. Even for the skilled trades, you need a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] background.
http://news.yahoo.com/science-engineering-festival-gives-brainiac-reputation-makeover-164000215.html
