International Women's Day pub quiz

On Sunday 8th March 2015, Hannah Dee and I organised a pub quiz for International Women's Day. We wanted to highlight some famous women in science, but we don't expect people to know much about famous women in science. So how to do a quiz? We themed 5 rounds around the women:

1) The Mary Anning fossil hunting round
A huge word search with many words related to Mary Anning's work and fossils to find (including "ichtheosaur" and "she sells sea shells", "on the sea shore".

2) The Amelia Earhart aviation round
Create paper aeroplanes that will travel from Europe (over here) to America (over there) and land within an area marked by a hula hoop. We should have had planes crossing the Atlantic in the other direction, but oh well, we're in west Wales.

3) The Caroline Herschel stargazing round
Early astronomy was often about spotting small differences in maps of the heavens. Thanks to heavens-above.com we had a copy of the sky map for the evening, and another copy that had been modified with gimp. Spot the difference! Three Gemini twins?

4) The Barbara McClintock genome round
Here we used C. Titus Brown's shotgunator to make a set of short reads from a few sentences about the work of Barbara McClintock. The teams had to assemble the genome to decipher the sentences. It must have seemed as if transposons were at work, because with a few repeated words the sentences they were constructing did get rather jumbled.



5) The Florence Nightingale data visualisation round
Finally the teams got to use a box of stuff (pipe cleaners, stickers, fluorescent paper, googly eyes, coloured pens) to make the most creative version of this year's HESA stats on women employed in higher education.

The scales of employment in HE

No trivia or celebrities in the quiz at all!