Previous Winners

In 2017, Science Rapper Jon Chase won the Josh Award. Jon Chase is a BBC Bitesize science presenter and has produced science raps for the BBC, Channel 4 learning and NASA amongst others.  He is also an author having recently co-written a book about the Science of Star Wars as well as the soon to be released Science of Harry Potter. 

His event, Hip Hop Science Stop Weekender, brought street and urban science to life with visitors getting hands-on with graffiti walls and turntables. He put on special performances for families, featuring a selection of his own raps and showcased science raps from around the globe. Visitors also learned how they could use everyday objects and waste materials such as straws, paper and string to do simple science experiments at home.

You can book Jon Chase here

Mathematician Dr Katie Steckles won the 2016 Josh Award and was the Science Communicator in Residence at Manchester Science Festival 2016.

Steckles turned the museum into a giant hand-made, crowd-sourced image during the Festival. Her winning application had Festival visitors helping to colour thousands of individual ‘pixels’ that would make up a picture in one of the museum’s windows representing how digital devices such as computers, tablets, and phones display images.

The project also looked at the mathematics behind how devices store images as a series of numbers that create the different colours on screen. There was also a close-up look at the pixels in your own phone’s screen and a photo booth that transforms you into an Excel spreadsheet of colour values.