Brief Encounter

So it also does bring curiosity back, as an adult. That gets beat out of kids. By the time they're in high school, they don't want to ask any questions [crosstalk] yeah. So, just bringing back that, or wonderings. I wonder what this is. I wonder what that is. And just having something that's cool that people maybe wonder about. For a lot of people they go their whole lives, or their whole adult lives, really not being curious, and not wondering. This is one of those small interactions, little small nuggets can really change the way that people perceive their world.

Critical thinking is, it's kind of like a muscle humans naturally have that atrophies. So one way that I do see that muscle being worked is I have, and it's very prominently displayed, a tardigrade shirt, "Live tiny. Die never." And so many times people are, "What is that?" And when I hear that, even if they're just walking by, I'll engage with them. I tell them, "Oh, it's a tardigrade or a water bear." And they're like, "Die never?" And I explain, "Oh, they're really resilient, you can do this, this, this, this." And this happens so much they go, "So what do we even do with them?" And I say, "Oh you know, we research them." They're like, "Oh, like for medicine?" If you're able to engage in a way that's prompting, then you're working out that critical thinking muscle. Even if it's a one minute interaction, I think that, that is really important.

it reminded me of looking at the Snapple cups. When you open Snapple and it's these little facts. It's like, "Oh." And sometimes I feel like I remember those things more because they were kind of out of place in my memory. So, it's like, "Oh." And even, we used to have candy that had the jokes in it, bongos or something like that Laffy Taffy. Yeah, yeah. It just seems like, "I get to go tell these jokes." It made me excited to know that one joke. So it's kind of like, I think, when you have that science fact, it may stick in people's minds more just, it's kind of the same thing as-it's out of place, so it kind of makes a different groove in your brain. Yeah. You're not reading it in a book, you're not on a science website. Yeah.

I was in a meeting where we realized that the stakeholders in our group, they didn't agree and when we were two years in and we just found out that some people thought that we needed hard numbers and we needed a pipeline and convert everyone to scientist like Rick was saying. And other people were like, "If I go to a music festival, I don't go in thinking I'm going to have to learn how to be a musician. I don't go to an art museum and I think, Oh no, I gotta be an artist." He's like, "It's only science educators who put all this pressure on themselves to raise scientists." And he was being a little bit facetious, but his point stuck with me. And so I think some of this tension about one-offs, short-term engagements, some of those matter, some of the most important events of our lives are one-offs. There are things that happened once.

So there is a lot of fun interplay between the audience of the parade and the people in the parade, but it is really quick. It's lightning fast and, like I said, the biggest challenge for trying to do a parade entry of this kind is, what is the stuff that has a meaningful impact in such a really short amount of time? It's got to have that high impulse so to speak.

Occasionally you get quote-unquote, lucky, that something ahead of you maybe slows down, if there's a vehicle that has an issue and so everything stopped for a little bit. Sometimes you have those rare moments where you have a little bit more interaction with the crowd. The phrase that kept coming to mind during this project was drive-by science. You don't have time to stop and do stuff with it, and so in an organizational sense that was a huge challenge of, what are some demonstrations that have a very short time to observe that can be on the move and don't require electricity, and aren't going to be so cumbersome, but it's going to slow everything else down. So it presented an interesting problem. But in terms of the crowd reaction, the crowd had a great reaction to everything that we were doing, really everything that was going on in the parade. I think partly that's a reflection of the characteristic of DragonCon, a conference as a whole. Everybody at the conference, with obvious outliers here and there, but everybody at the conference was always very supportive of everybody else at the conference.

I do think one of the challenges for doing science in that setting, is that when you're a marching group you're moving pretty fast, and so what is it that you can communicate quickly as you're marching past people? That's a little bit of a challenge.