A hand holding a gold trophy with (Science Slam 2023" printed on its black base. The hand is also holding a brochure marketing the Science Slam event.

This post is written as personal reflections by Assoc. Prof. Lobna Hassan

Science Slams are popular all over the world under different names. The idea is that you take the stage at a restaurant or a bar, and present your research to the general public, who, then, votes for the best presenter by applauding them loudly.

We as academics are used to talking to other academics who understand our language. We are used to talking at conferences, in the office, or other controlled places where the people we are talking to are at least pretending to listen to us and nothing really surprising can happen (a controlled environment, if you will).

But when an academic needs to talk about their research at a Science Slam, all the rules are changed. Here, the only way to get the audience’s attention is to speak their language, not your academic one. The environment is noisy, loud, bright, full of distraction, and you need the audience to genuinely want to listen to you and you also need to keep your nerves under control.

Now that I have set the scene, let me tell you how Alena Valtonen and I prepared for the Lahti 2023 Science Slam and won it.

I think it says a lot about Lahti that the audience voted for us, the only English speaking duo at the event and possibly in the history of the Lahti Science Slam. We were lucky and privileged to have had such a wonderful audience!

The story starts one Tuesday, when I received an email from a colleague at LUT, helping to organise the Science Slam. I was asked if I would volunteer to represent LUT and possibly give a talk on gamification.

I am not gonna lie, I was reluctant to do it. Between teaching and research, I had very little time left to plan such a talk, but my colleague really encouraged me, and helped me develop an initial idea for the talk.

Science Slams are usually popular amongst PhD students, as part of their career and skills development, but when I was a PhD student, I was never nominated to do it. In fact, when I would try to nominate myself, the spot would be given to someone else in my group. It was not a big deal for me, but it was a “deal enough” that I still remember it that many years later. Being offered this spot now, I felt like it was a chance for me to do something I was not given the chance to do before, and to also, hopefully, proudly represent my university and research team.

After I agreed to join the Science Slam, I ran into my colleague Alena Valtonen a few days later. She told me that she also wanted to participate in the Science Slam. And so, we decided to join forces!

Over several weeks, we developed the idea of the talk together. We started with a brainstorming call for us to understand what each of us researched and to figure out a way to merge it together. Then, we wrote an initial outline without any specific details.

At that point, the Science Slam organisers had approached me for a short description of the talk. They needed to add it to flyers that there were about to print. I was told to make the description as funny as I wanted. The “mistake” that I did here, was that I wrote about dragons in the description. Here is the description:

“Research can be boring until it is fun and games! Lobna Hassan is a professor, but one who collects Pokémon, goes into battle with Witchers, and befriends Magical Beasts. With her and Alena Valtonen, you just might leave Teerenpeli a dragon slayer…. or a dragon trainer, the choice is yours!”

Now, Alena and I had discussed Pokémon, but no one had said anything about dragons. What was I thinking? Why did I do that? I honestly don’t know. I was struggling to write a description and it just happened. Dragons are cool, I guess.

But we were now locked into preparing a talk that had dragons in it, and, in retrospect, that was the creative challenge we needed!

We started by developing our outline into full speeches separately. Then we met face to face to read the speeches out loud to each other, make them fit together, and figure out how the H we could add dragons to any of it. Quickly we thought, “isn’t there a Pokemon that looks like a dragon?”

I am not sure how the creative process work, and I am not sure how many times we rehearsed the speech together. I see at least 4 calendar bookings for our creative meetings, and during these meetings, we just kept thinking out loud together, giving each other suggestions, until we figured out a seamless way to transition from Pokémon to dragon!

We also wanted to engage the audience and to do something with them. I had an idea on the back of my mind that if we can already get the audience expressing some sort of a sound during our talk, then they would be “primed” and more likely to clap and shout for us when it comes to voting. Alena seemed to share the same thought that we needed to engage the audience, and we started from the idea of an audio game, ending at an audio experience to de-stress.

We also started thinking that we needed props for our talk, specifically a dragon Pokémon plushie, aka Charizard or possibly a Charmander. We needed something soft because were planning to show the thingy to the audience and we did not want anyone to get hurt. I looked for either Pokémon EVERYWHERE, at all the toy stores and mega supermarkets I could reach in Helsinki. These things were all over the place in the summer but they were nowhere to be found now.