How to make clear a scientific concept

When you are a researcher in a scientific field, there are many ways to make people understand what you are working on: the classic way is to teach them the phenomenon in a class, but of course it is only aimed for students. For a larger public, you can make a conference, but the problem is that it is not enough interactive.

The last fashionable and better idea in the scientific world is to present your work on a simple poster. This one must be clear, with not too much text and it must contain many pictures: the principle aim is to attract people with good pictures, letting them read the short texts you wrote. If they are interested and want to learn more about your work, they will ask you some questions. And now your job is to explain more than the texts on the poster by basing you on the pictures.
The advantage of this strategy is at the beginning, to let the interested person understand the main idea by himself (because you don’t talk to him first, not like in class or in a conference). So it will be easier for him to be precise when asking questions, and it will take less time to make you clear (because he already knows the subject and its consequences)!

On last Tuesday, students in master 1 in physics had to make a poster about a scientific device or theory. I found one very attractive and very clear about the different microscopes invented and the way they work. I would like to show it to you because it is for me a good example of what I was just telling you before in this post:

You can see that the colour (brown/red) makes the poster very good-looking. There are lots of pictures that give us easy information and catch us to learn more about microscopes. The texts are now here to make us curious and asking questions to the poster owners: this is exactly what happened to me. For example, about the third slide on Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy, I couldn’t find the link between the IBM picture and the device because this picture shows us that you can move atoms as you like whereas the presented device is used to see atoms. The missing information was a good way to interact with my colleagues and that was the point!

Thank you for this pleasant time with drinks and peanuts!