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Hello!
Thank you so much for visiting the 3D Pollen Project website - it's great to have you here and I hope you're looking forward to sharing in this journey as much as we're looking forward to getting it underway. In this blog post I wanted to set out a bit of background for the project - specifically why we're doing it and what we hope to achieve.
So, why are we doing this? The most immediate reason is because the lovely people behind the I'm A Scientist competition gave me some funds to spend on an outreach project, and I'd promised the (several hundred) school children in my zone that I'd try making 3D pollen models if I won the money. (For more about this, see here.) But the idea first came to me in late 2016, when I was still a science teacher with several hundred school students to worry about in real, offline life.
It struck me that pollen analysis could be quite challenging to visually engage children in - especially without access to powerful microscopes - and that creating larger-than-life models of the grains could be a way around this. I was thrilled, therefore, to discover that I wasn't the first to this idea - Dr Kat Holt, of Massey University, had been winning acclaim in New Zealand for doing just this.
After starting my PhD I got in touch and she pointed me in the direction of some useful resources. By this time I'd started to grapple with the dizzying diversity of tropical pollen, and I realised that having models and scans you could handle and manipulate - essentially a 3-dimensional reference collection - might also be useful for teaching and learning, as well as outreach. Meeting Rhiannon Philp (an archaeology PhD student at Cardiff University) and her own 3D pollen models at a conference only made me more convinced of this.
So, one key aim for this project is to produce biologically accurate 3D scans and models of pollen grains, to be used for teaching and outreach. While you can design models from scratch (as showcased by Twitter's @1manscan), we're hopeful that the scans our confocal microscopy methods produce - as well as the printed models - will themselves prove useful. (And, crucially, none of us knows how to design 3D models...)
To do this, we first plan to compare different methods of scanning pollen grains and assess their utility for different applications. From these scans we then hope to produce short animations showing (for example), what a given pollen grain looks like from different angles and in different cross-sectional views. Ideally we could then give students a way to manipulate the scans themselves to help them learn and apply their pollen ID skills. And printing physical models from these scans will let students hold biologically-accurate, larger-than-life models in their hands, hopefully helping them make sense of the small, flat images visible down their microscopes. We expect there to be a positive effect on their engagement and learning, and plan to evaluate this as part of the project.
But underpinning this whole project is the belief that showing people pollen grains in all their alien intricacy helps us reach out to others and inspire them about our research. I remain hugely passionate about inspiring school children with science (so I'd love to chat about ideas for outreach sessions that use the pollen models), but I hope these models will also be effective for communicating with scientist peers, the public, journalists, policymakers and more. And to ensure that our project reaches the widest possible audience, we plan to make our scans and modelling files freely available for non-commercial use.
So, that's the plan! I hope you're as excited about it as I am - to keep up with our progress, follow us on Twitter, drop us an email asking for updates, or check back here regularly. It'd be great to hear from you.
Oli