So I know I was meant to talk about plastics in my next post, but I wrote a little something for the internal work magazine and thought I would share it here too... Now, ‘Kale’ us crazy, but at Terrific Scientific we’ve been on a mission to get 9-11 year olds to eat their greens with something called an Exposure study (I promise, it’s not as sinister as it sounds). It seemed an impossible task, but we partnered with Coventry University and asked children at four schools across the UK to eat a bit of kale every day for 15 days. They recorded their reaction to kale every day, ranging from hating to loving it, and we compared their reactions on the first to last day. On the last day, I went into the schools and tested the children’s ‘Taster Status’. Everyone falls into one of three categories: Non-tasters (people less sensitive to bitterness, 25% of population), Tasters (somewhere in between, 50% of population) and Supertasters (people incredibly sensitive to bitterness, 25% of population). Imagine tasting things in pastel or neon, these are the extremes of tasting. We then compared this to their kale ratings and found their opinions had changed! Non-tasters and Tasters showed the most improvement, but Supertasters may have needed more time to get used to the kale. This was a brilliant finding and became the basis of our Live Lesson on 31 January which was broadcast live across the country to primary school children and can now be watched here. We also asked school children across the country to uncover their taster status and send in their results to build a national picture of Supertasters. We’re hoping this is the start of something great for this BBC Learning project, as it’s the first of 10 interactive investigations for 9-11 year olds to do in the classroom. It sounds a cliché, but I never thought I’d be here! I imagined a world of creatives like the BBC would have no room for a nerdy scientist like me. Having recently completed an MSc Conservation & Biodiversity, my background has always been very ‘Biology heavy’. I find this study and those to come incredibly exciting, and only the BBC could pull off something on this scale in such a short amount of time. It's been amazing working with Breakfast and seeing our results on Newsround and even a couple of newspapers! A job aiming to inspire the next generation of budding scientists seems too good to be true, and I’ll always be grateful I’ve had the opportunity to be part of it. For more information on BBC Learning’s new campaign visit the Terrific Scientific website. Teachers, parents and anyone who’s interested can join in the conversation on social media using #TerrificScientific
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