BM: What were you doing with Techniquest before you became director when you were working full time?
CJ: Well it started because - In Cardiff University I was a lecturer in science education. And my students then were either PGCE, pre-service teacher trainees or they, were Masters students doing in-service degrees of one sort or another. And, so in effect we had a captive labour force among the PGCE students of people who wanted to explore different teaching techniques and when we had the idea of setting up Techniquest we were able to give those students an opportunity of doing small scale teaching within the trial Techniquest environment. So in 1986 those students had a different sort of teaching experience to any previous ones. They also had a little bit of employment and enabled to get the Techniquest idea off the ground.
My input was that, I was enthusiastic about, this way of spreading the word. My head of department was the guy who was running with it and he enlisted, others who were interested and prepared to put a bit of time in. And that was basically it to start with. When I joined the staff of Techniquest it was actually to develop the ChemiQuest project because we wanted to develop some chemistry exhibits, which is rather a difficult thing to do. Physics is easy because when you walk away it goes back to where it was before but the whole nature of chemistry is that it's about change. And if you want to do irreversible change then you set yourself a problem of how do you put it right again or start again when the next customer comes along. So doing chemistry in a stand alone hands on environment like this requires quite a lot of careful thought. And we got a grant from the Shell Education Service over a period of 5 years in the end which allowed Techniquest to employ me, on a part-time basis and also a research officer. And we used the resources of Techniquest and ourselves to develop quite a number of chemistry exhibits, some of which have reached a commercial level of exploitation since.