Ms Fiona Longmuir:

I would love to. The ISL project was one of the projects that made me want to work with the Institute of Physics. I saw it on its website and thought it was an amazing project because it is meeting the specific need of a community that is being disenfranchised from the science community and making sure it has a language to engage with science, technology, engineering and maths. It is a project that is being run out of DCU. The first phase is now complete. We now have a video glossary of a number of STEM terms. Approximately 200 physics terms are on the website that previously did not exist. Previously, teachers would use different terms so a deaf or hard of hearing student moving through his or her education might have a teacher who used different signs for multiplication, for example, which meant that student would have to learn a new sign every time. Some of the more scientific language did not have an existing sign at all. The purpose of this piece of work was to bring together those signs that exist, such as sun, star and moon, and to develop agreed signs for those words that did not have agreed signs previously. It is a piece of work I am very proud to have been a small part of.