Hosting a Zone Meeting? Click Here!
Zone meetings bring together students from SPS chapters within geographical zones. They are a fun and effective way for undergraduates to meet other students, present their research, and interact with practicing scientists. Zone meetings in 2022 & 2023 will continue to serve these purposes, but how we hold them may be a little different from usual. SPS National recommends that all zone meetings should be held according to national and local safety recommendations and guidance with respect to COVID-19.
If Zone Meetings will be held virtually:
- The Associate Zone Councilor and Zone Councilor will chair the virtual zone meetings
- An SPS Chapter will continue to host part or all of the zone meeting
- It is recommended that a chapter of which the AZC or ZC is not a member host each part of the meeting.
- The dates for all zone meetings are set and available here.
- Ask SPS National for a zoom meeting with breakout rooms sps [at] aip.org
Resources provided by SPS National:
- Apply for funding. Examples include: trivia prizes, competition awards, materials to be mailed to chapters
- Request a speaker through the Alumni Engagement Program.
- Ask for someone from SPS national to join the meeting or record a greeting: sps [at] aip.org
Resources to try out:
- gather.town - you can make a virtual space to meet and chat with people - good for ice breakers
- Miro.com - a place to make a virtual white board and sticky note space for many people - good for group work
- SPS Virtual Lounge on Discord - Plan out the zone meeting and connect to people
Template schedule:
6:00 – 6:10 PM Welcome and opening remarks by AZC and ZC
-Share information about yourselves and how you can help
6:10 – 6:30 PM Icebreaker games in small breakout rooms
- We recommend that each room contain at most 6 people and be randomly assigned
6:30 – 7:00 PM Plenary speaker from the Alumni Engagement Program
- 20-minute talk
- 10 minutes of questions
- Remind the speaker to share information about their personal career path
7:00 – 7:15 PM Small group puzzle
- Zoom room escape room, fermi problem, or some other task that is fun
7:15 – 8:00 PM Student Presentations – Pop talks
- Recommended: Each presenter has no more than 4 slides and 3 minutes to present
- Each presenter has 2 minutes of questions
8:00 – 8:10 PM Break
8:10 – 8:30 PM Group sharing of what chapters are doing to maintain community within their chapters
8:30 – 8:45 PM Virtual Laboratory Tour
- Share virtual tour of a national lab or observatory. Resources available here.
8:45 – 10:00 PM Game night and/or and/or Demo competition
Suggestions: Trivia, Pictionary, Jackbox games, or Physics Jeopardy
- Download Physics Jeopardy (good for teams)
- Free Pictionary-style game (good for small groups)
- Protip: Google forms can be set up as quizzes to automatically grade teams, like this (good for larger numbers of people)
- Universesandbox http://universesandbox.com/
- An example demo competition could look like this, with a voting form like this
- Less than 60-second-long video
- Provide a title slide for them to use
- Themes are fun, such as everyone make a “Demos you can do at home”