Extra Credit: UC-Wide Grand Slam

For this extra credit assignment, I watched 10 mini-presentations by 10 students from different UC campuses. These 3 minutes presentations taught me a lot of interesting facts and some techniques to write my scicomm article effectively. From Melis Çakar’s presentation, I learned that the part of the brain that causes Autism is the cerebellum. I thought the cerebellum was only responsible for motor functions of the human body. From Natalie Pedicino’s presentation, I learned that diarrhea turns out to be the second highest threat to children, and the virus that causes diarrhea is called astrovirus. I thought diarrhea was simply caused by an upset stomach. From Iris Garcia-Pak’s presentation, I learned that our brain is not allowing everything to enter it, it has a highly regulated system to control what goes in and out. Those interesting facts are something I never heard of and I’m so excited that I learned about them!

One Scicomm writing technique I learned is from Melis and Sasha’s presentation. It is a good idea to add some relevant jokes to the Scicomm article to grab the audience's attention. People usually will be attracted to something funny and they can relate to. In Sasha’s presentation, she started with a joke about people entering a room but immediately forgot why they entered that room. I can’t strongly relate to this situation because it happens to me all the time. I believe that many other people have the same experience. This joke immediately connected the topic and the audience so they would become more interested in the presentation. This joke is also very relevant to her topic of memory loss. Another writing technique I learned is from Natalie and Victoria’s presentation. I learned that we should start our Scicomm article with some description of the topic that gives the audience a little bit of background information. We should also add the reason why the audience should care about what we are researching in this section. In Natalie’s presentation, she introduced diarrhea by telling the audience that it is the second leading cause of children’s death. This information would immediately grab the audience’s attention because we all care about our younger generation. Victoria introduced the bacteria by telling the audience that bacteria are all around us and some of them are beneficial and some are harmful. This would hook the audience because they would realize that bacteria is something they have to deal with. Both presenters did a great job of introducing their topics and making the audience interested. 

I found Kacie Ring’s presentation most interesting and I would vote for her (Go Gauchos!). Even though this choice consists of the factor that she is from UCSB, I truly find her presentation very interesting. She introduced how the health of forests relates to the health of humans. Before listening to this presentation, I could never connect the forest’s health with humans’ health. However, they are connected closely. She started her presentation with a historical event to prove that her research matters. This is an effective way to answer the “so what?” question. I think Kacie’s slides are the best among all 10 students. She included very cool animations which made her point very clear and interesting. The part I like the most about is the sunglasses on the rats! This decision made her presentation much more appealing to the non-professional audience. I love her creativity!