Powering Up Nuclear Skills: a novel card game to support teaching of nuclear skills
By Dr Sarah E. Lu (primary & corresponding author), Mr Shaun D. Hemming (co-author), Dr Jamie M. Purkis (co-author)
Published in Nuclear Future 21.2
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SUMMARY
- Improving teaching of ‘nuclear’ skills necessary to meet growing sector and retiring workforce
- Can we use games to enhance teaching of nuclear science to 11-18 year olds?
- Yes: “RAD ratings”, tested with and positive feedback from >1000 students in 13 UK schools
- Resource freely available to everyone – we want people to use it! – to improve STEM outcomes
AUTHORS
Dr Sarah Lu is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Clean Chemistry team within the Nuclear and Radiochemistry group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, specialising in radioanalytical characterization, microfluidics, and Lab-on-a-chip technologies. She has led Rad Ratings and has engaged over 6,000 students globally, adapting the educational game for U.S. audiences and collaborating with the University of Southampton to develop an interactive website. A graduate of the
University of Southampton, UK, in 2023, Dr. Lu also serves as a Visiting Researcher there. She has been recognised as a Nuclear Energy Agency 2024 “Rising Star,” was awarded the Roy G. Post Scholarship in 2023, and named one of the UK’s Top 50 Women in Engineering in 2022.
Mr Shaun Hemming is a postgraduate research student at the University of Southampton, UK,developing and applying a clean-up technique known as electrokinetic remediation towards problematic radioactive contaminants at nuclear sites. His work primarily targets difficult-to-measure radionuclides in materials such as groundwaters, sediments and concretes. He is a STEM ambassador and has organised many University outreach events and school engagement visits since 2021. Prior to this, he completed a MSci degree in geology (2016-2020) at the University of Southampton. His final year project focussed on testing derivatives of the metal-organic framework UiO-66 for adsorption of technetium in groundwater.
Dr Jamie Purkis is a Senior Waste and Decommissioning Consultant with Cavendish Nuclear (part of Babcock Group), Chartered Chemist, Chartered Scientist, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK, focusing on nuclear waste management and decommissioning. He is also a STEM Ambassador and regularly contributes to university engagement and outreach events. From 2019 – 2021 he was a Research Fellow in Nuclear Decommissioning at the University of Southampton developing novel methods to clean-up radioactively contaminated land. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2019 with an NNL-funded PhD developing uranium reprocessing methods using light, and from the University of Southampton in 2015 examining air-sensitive alkaline earth compounds.