Science Busking on a Beach!

Today our Communicating Earth Sciences lecture was about Geoscience Outreach, which is a way of engaging the public to teach them about various aspects of geosciences. We were put in groups and given a scenario where we had a location, a group of people and topic, and we had to come up with an idea of how to communicate the topic to the group of people. Our topic was Mass Extinction, our group of people were young children and adults without any scientific background and our location was a beach!
We came up with the idea of building a large 3D sand sculpture of a dinosaur and a sand timeline showing when the five major mass extinction events occurred, with piles of sand showing what percentage of species were wiped out. This should encourage people to come over, and then we could ask them what they know about extinction events. We could then develop on their knowledge, and explain about the different events, concentrating on their timing, how many species were wiped out, what species were wiped out and what caused the mass extinction. The plan was to do this as a song, to help keeps the children entertained, but also give the adults some information that they may find interesting, and hopefully they can go home with a bit more knowledge about geology.
The idea of this is that's it's a good way of engaging many different people in a flexible way, as it can be done on any beach at any time (depending on time), but it is also cheap, as all you need are some willing volunteers to talk to the public and a spade for building the sculptures!
This was very interesting, as it made us think about how we have to talk to people to give them more information about geology, and how we can make it engaging and fun, so that they will remember what we tell them.