Theme: Transferable Skills

The aim of this course is:

• To gain a wider understanding of some of the issues around mental health for self and others
• To increase confidence to offer appropriate support to those living with mental health issues
• To experience an introduction to the topic and to the content of the full MHFA course

This workshop will offer support and practical advice for early-career researchers who wish to develop engaging and accessible presentations and activities relating their own research to the existing mathematical knowledge and understanding of school-age children and non-specialist members of the public.

Participants will have the opportunity to try out some engaging maths resources, discuss the links between school-level mathematics and mathematical research, and create their own "elevator pitch" to sum up their own research in an easy-to-understand, jargon-free way.

This workshop is particularly suitable for anyone wishing to get involved with the upcoming Cambridge Science Festival.

This session will help you to identify the key ideas within your research that you wish to communicate, and then develop your understanding of how to use a mixture of conceptual approaches, examples and analogies to explain complex mathematical ideas to an audience with no specialist mathematical or scientific knowledge. The workshop is designed to be very practical, with the aim that you’ll come away with at least an opening and closing paragraph, and an outline for a piece of work. Participants are asked to prepare for the workshop by identifying an idea they would like to work on.

This session will aim to develop a finished piece of writing, focussing on editing and finessing a piece participants have already drafted (for those also attending the writing workshop, this can build on the piece you worked on in the writing workshop). The workshop will involve practical exercises that can be used to improve a piece of writing. The workshop will include time to work individually and in groups redrafting existing work. The aim is to come to the workshop with a draft, and leave the workshop with a finished piece of writing.