Cracking open the essence of the Nutshell Games
A Q&A chat with Patty Raun, founding director of the Center for Communicating Science
Patty Raun has no shortage of metaphors for the Nutshell Games.
“Communication is a muscle. The Nutshell Games are crunches or planks that help build that muscle.”
“It’s kind of like researchers’ speed-dating an audience of several hundred people.”
An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Theatre Arts and the founding director of the Center for Communicating Science, Raun and her team have been leading the event since it began in 2017. Now in its 10th iteration, the games task Virginia Tech graduate students with explaining research to a public audience and a panel of judges — including two 7th graders – in just 90 seconds.
This semester’s games will be held on Oct. 23 at 5:30 pm in the Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre at the Center for the Arts. Prior to the event, Raun broke down the essence of the Nutshell Games and why people should not miss this free public event.
Can you explain the nutshell games, in a nutshell?
The researchers are on stage in a huge auditorium in front of several hundred community members. They use clear language, tell compelling stories, and don’t have a podium or slides to rely on. They are very vulnerable and courageous. It's high-stakes ($500 research support for each winner!), high-energy, and proves that if you truly understand something, you can help others understand it, too.
Think of it as the Olympics of “so what? where the winners are the participants who best answer why their research matters to their grandmother, a middle schooler, or a town council member…or to our world. That took me 47 seconds to say…
What are the new elements featured in the Nutshell Games this year?
Every year is a little bit different, as we learn and grow. This fall we are introducing a new “audience choice award” where the audience will vote for their favorite presentation. So the entire community who heard the presenters will select the first winner, the panel of judges will choose three more winners, and the presenter with the most-viewed video after a month on the VT Center for Communicating Science YouTube Channel will win the fifth and final award for this year’s games.
We will also host an informal meet-and-greet/cookie social after the games in the lobby of the Center for the Arts. We’ve heard from our audiences that they’d like to have an opportunity to ask questions of our presenters so this year they’ll have a chance to do that.
Why is it important for Virginia Tech to host the Nutshell Games?
These days important research can be buried under jargon and complexity (not to mention TikTok and KPop). The Nutshell Games are Virginia Tech's Center for Communicating Science’s attempt to cross the moat out of the Ivory Tower. With the Nutshell Games, we create an opportunity for the next generation of scientists and researchers to do something that is increasingly important and help people in our communities care about important work that moves our civilization forward.
Why should people attend?
It is exciting. It is fun. Folks tend to come for one of two reasons:
To support the courageous participants, or
To witness the spectacle of seeing brilliant minds sweat under a stopwatch.
Audiences stay for the moment when someone makes nanotechnology sound as simple as making a sandwich…and suddenly, they get it. It is a really joyful and exciting event.
What skills do the presenters need to be effective, and can anyone gain these skills?
There is no magic formula because each individual is fascinating in their own unique way, but there are some things effective presenters have in common.
Desire to put in the work,
Responsiveness to an audience,
Storytelling, and
The courage to “murder your darlings” (specifically, all that technical language you worked so hard to learn).
Effective presenters need to read the room to find the thing that folks can relate to in their specific research, and to remember that metaphors are their superpower. You don't need to be born a Richard Feynman or Neil deGrasse Tyson. You just need to practice, get feedback, fail a few times, and remember that your audience isn't stupid. They're just busy with the things that are important to them and in the Nutshell Games, presenters have 90 seconds to make their work important to the audience. To ignite their curiosity. These skills are absolutely learnable.
