Storytelling through animation: Oxford Sparks

Oxford Sparks is a portal that launched in 2012, with the aim of bringing together resources that have been created across the University of Oxford and elsewhere for the purpose of wider engagement with science. To bring attention to this site, Oxford Sparks developed a set of high-quality short animations, each designed to tell a story relating to a current area of science. These animations have been launched on YouTube, and will shortly be available on iTunesU, and have covered broad areas of science from subduction zones (';Underwater Volcano Disaster'), through the early history of the solar system (';Rogue Planet') to the workings of the Large Hadron Collider (';A quick look around the LHC'). The animations have each been developed in close collaboration with researchers, created by a team with experience of education, engagement and outreach. The two minute scripts are intended to be both widely accessible and viewable as ';stand alone' stories. To this end, the scripts are humorous; while the animations are delightfully quirky, and created by professional animator with a degree-level science background. The animations are also intended to be used as ';lesson starters' in school, and educational activities graded for different age groups are being developed in parallel with the animations. They have been used, successfully, on pre-university summer schools, and in university classes. We are gathering both quantitative (analytics) and qualitative (school teacher and student focus group) feedback to monitor the success of the project, and to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. In the first year since launch, Oxford Sparks animations were viewed over 80,000 times on YouTube, in part due to the surge of interest in the Large Hadron Collider animation after the discovery of the Higgs Boson.