Professor Tim Roberts of the Tom Farrell Institute for the Environment says that an environmentally sustainable world can be pictured as a fried egg on a plate. The yolk or innermost circle represents an economy where there are jobs for all, and this sits within a fair and equitable society represented by the white of the egg, which itself sits on the plate which is the earth itself being left in a state that we would like our grandchildren to inherit.

 

Central to achieving such a world is the generation in our children of the necessary skills and enthusiastic interest to be able to contribute to these three concentric rings of sustainability. Skills and interest in STEM are seen as critical to this process.

 

Prof Tim Roberts and A/Prof Peter Howley have taken Sustainability, Statistics and STEM to rural and remote communities, travelling the NSW countryside for a fortnight visiting schools and running teacher workshops, as part of their equity-oriented HEPPP grant project “Early Engagement – Tertiary Success: Sustainability meets Statistics and STEM”.

 

The project, won along with A/Prof Maree Gruppetta of the Wollotuka Institute, aimed to engage students and teachers with innovative and industry-oriented practice, and assist those in low SES, remote and rural regions connect with, aspire to, and succeed in, higher education.

 

The team delivered activities targeted at addressing barriers to higher education success, namely an understanding of science and statistics. Electric vehicles, mushroom kits, designing clinical trials for new medicines, modelling human features in forensic anthropology and reflections about pizza were but some of the activities and discussions within this cross-disciplinary outreach in environmental sustainability (renewable energies), statistics and STEM.