It was obvious from the start that Fran Scott was a girl to be reckoned with. A straight-A student who graduated high school with advanced-levels exams in biology, chemistry, math and physics, Scott matched her academic prowess with practical, hands-on experience helping with the chores at her family farm.

“I grew up in an atmosphere where you could be anything because you didn’t have to know what you had to be,” said Scott (pictured), science and engineering presenter and maker (and pyrotechnician). “I just combined that love of science and being practical together.”

Scott spoke with Stu Miniman and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Europe event in Denmark. They discussed Scott’s talent for making complex scientific ideas accessible to everyone through fun experiments that make concepts easy to grasp (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Fran Scott in its Women in Tech feature.

Merging the intellectual and the practical

Scott’s straight-A performance continued at university, where she gained both an undergraduate’s degree and then a master’s in neuroscience. But despite her stellar grades, Scott found her course was too much lab work and not enough learning, and she was itching to try something more challenging and hands-on.

During a visit to the Science Museum in London, Scott was hooked by the interactive displays and demonstrations. She knew she wanted to be the person designing and making the installations, and she wasn’t going to be shy about it.

“I got a job at the Science Museum in London by just approaching someone … and being like, ‘How do I get a job here?’” Scott said. She makes it sound easy, but in truth she visited the museum every month for a year “harassing them to give me a job,” she said.

Playing with fire doesn’t have to burn

Perseverance is a hallmark of Scott’s character. She discovered her passion for “science demonstrations and building stuff” at the Science Museum, but her personality led her onwards to seek a more public forum for her talents.

“I love what the Science Museum did, but people had to come to us,” Scott said in a recent interview with Nutanix’s NEXT magazine. “What if we could go to them? What if we could be in their front room when they flip on the telly and science is there?”

Getting her foot in the door of the TV world wasn’t easy. Scott devoted all her spare time to the task.  Taking courses to gain experience in television production and sending numerous emails to children’s science program presenters. When she was finally offered a chance to work on a show, it was still far from the limelight.

“I worked a lot of the time behind the scenes just trying to get the science right,” said Scott, describing her time creating experiments that non-scientist presenters performed on-camera. “Then I realized there was no one like me doing science presenting…. The girl was always the little bit of extra on the side, and it was the man who was the knowledgeable one that was showing how to do the science,” she said.

‘I didn’t care if it was me. I just wanted a woman to do it.’

As soon as she realized that female scientists just didn’t exist in popular culture, Scott set out to right the imbalance. “I was like, ‘Hang on. Let’s try and flip this,’” she said.

At first, she didn’t see herself taking on the role; she just “wanted a woman to do it.” The goal was that girls would see women performing science experiments rather than just supporting a male presenter.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Scott stated.

Getting more women into STEM careers is about more than getting girls to “like” science, according to Scott. In her Twitter feed, she discusses how gender stereotyping starts at a very early age. “We need to stop seeing boys and girls as having different likes,” she tweeted. “Instead view them as individuals (free from our gender biases), individuals with a spectrum of interests. We need to expose them to a variety of toys, subjects, experiences and see what sparks their interest.”

As well as gender bias, poor teaching and complicated explanations can kill a child’s natural love of STEM subjects. “Sometimes the steps are too big for you to understand the amazingness of that thing that’s happening,” Scott said. “And if you don’t understand that amazingness, of course you’re going to lose interest.”

Exposing the excitement of the natural world in an engaging and fun way became Scott’s way of sharing her love of practical science with the world. “Anyone can understand anything as long as you make the steps to get there small enough,” she said.

Coding without complexity

As her reputation grew, Scott’s experiment creation skills became in demand. As part of a drive to introduce children to code, Scott was asked to create visual ways to demonstrate computer coding. Undeterred by the fact she couldn’t code (yet), Scott accepted the challenge.

“I learnt code, and I came up with an explosions-based coding show,” she said.

The show, which Scott described as mixing “computing and fireballs,” used Raspberry Pi computers to demonstrate the fun and unusual things coding could do. “People were stumped as to how to show coding visually,” Scott said. “But because this is what we do day in and day out with different subjects, we could do it with coding just like we do it with physics.”

Does perfect design exist?

Scott attended last week’s .NEXT event as moderator for a panel on the fusion of technology and design. “As a scientist, prop builder, person that does engineering day in and day out, I love something when it’s perfectly designed … if there is such a thing as a perfect design,” Scott stated.

Everyone knows good design when they see it, she added. But being able to blend aesthetics and practicality to create a frictionless and pleasing experience for the user is much harder.

“You can’t have something that’s just beautiful. But, you can’t have something that just works. You need to have it as a mixture of both,” Scott said.

This requires collaboration and understanding between designers, engineers and consumers, according to Scott. “It’s those engineers talking with the designers, the designers talking with the engineers … both of them talking with the consumers. And from that, good design comes,” she concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of .NEXT Europe. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for .NEXT Europe. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

 Photo: SiliconANGLE