Ha! I think £500 is pretty generous. Coming to talk to schools won’t cost anything other than petrol/train tickets so I should be able to get to a lot of schools for that. Having a £500 prize just encourages us to think creatively about what we ant to do with it and having a competition add an extra bit of excitement to taking part in “I’m a scientist”
My salary amounts to about 50p per working minute – if I spend 1,000 minutes doing this then £500 is quite fair.
There really is a lot of use that can be made with small amounts of money. E.g. I could use it to take a one or two day course in the latest web programming tech, which then means I can do much nicer looking interactive web sites, which means much better science dissemination.Or I could buy a fairly sophisticated programmable robot that I could take to schools, and use it to help get them interested in computing. Or I could give it to Sarah if she told me it might make a real difference in getting her community composting scheme off the ground.
I think I get paid fairly for the work I do, but the £500 prize money will be useful because it will help us to develop projects to engage with schools/colleges that we might not otherwise be able to pay for!
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