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The Motivate video-conferencing project links mathematicians and scientists to primary and secondary schools across the whole of the UK, with international links between UK schools and South Africa, the USA, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore and India too. Most speakers are research mathematicians and scientists, either established or PhD students, while others work in industry, or are current classroom teachers who have particular expertise to offer.The aim of the programme is to raise the general educational aspirations of the participating school students, to stretch them intellectually, to develop their communication skills and confidence and to show them that mathematics might have a part to play in their futures.Motivate conferences are highly interactive. The most common format is a pair of video-conferenced seminars about a month apart. In the first video-conference, the expert speaker talks to the students about why they chose to study maths, physics or engineering and pursue research as a career, and then leads the students in exploring the topic / examples covered so far include, among many others, the maths of sport, the mathematical modelling of disease dynamics, the fluid dynamics of avalanches, labyrinths and mazes, forensic mathematics and global debt. Follow-up project work is then set for the pupils to work on between the video-conferences, involving collaborative investigative work into the topic. The students have the opportunity to work on projects that enrich and extend the normal mathematics / science curricula and allow them to develop transferable skills in motivating their groups and presenting their research. The students then present their findings to the speaker and the other schools involved, and answer questions from their peers and the expert in the second video-conference a few weeks later. Sixth-form conferences and some conferences for younger age groups consist of a single day master class with break-out group workshops. There are also long projects, which last over a school year to give schools the opportunity to work with each other on an extended project.Each conference involves a group of around 4-6 different schools, and the programme is open to application from any school. The conferences are enormously popular, with the programme always oversubscribed / most of the main programme conferences have waiting lists of as many schools again as can actually be involved - and feedback is extremely positive. In addition, the project tasks and supporting notes are freely available to all schools on the Motivate website (www.motivate.maths.org), and the programme therefore has an additional reach, with many schools using these resources to support summer schools or Maths Day activities. Over the past school year (2006/7) the Motivate website received 500,000 site visits, or 6.75 million hits.The Motivate Project coordinator, Dr Jenny Gage, is an experienced teacher, with a PhD in mathematics education. The Motivate project works closely with teachers, who have a significant part to play in directing their students and evaluating the programme. The project offers CPD opportunities in building and extending teachers' subject knowledge and enabling them to explore and experiment with new teaching strategies suggested by the potential of video-conferencing.The current proposal is to support, continue and develop this existing highly successful project, building on its outstanding track record in creating links between current academic researchers and school students throughout the UK and overseas, while providing a tried and tested interface for the presentation of EPSRC-related research in an accessible format and at an appropriate level for the target audience.
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