Communication Assignment: Speed of Light — Public-Facing One-Pager

Due: One week after your group completes this experiment

Note: because groups rotate through experiments on different weeks, due dates will diﬀer between groups. Check with your instructor if you are unsure of your group’s due date.

Your Assignment

You have measured the speed of light. Now tell someone about it.

Your task is to produce a one-page public-facing flyer about this experiment — something that could be posted on a bulletin board, shared on social media, or handed to a stranger at a science cafe. Your audience is a curious non-scientist: someone who did not study physics but is interested in the world and willing to read or listen to something engaging.

This flyer is an advertisement for a presentation you are about to give. Its job is not to explain everything — it is to make your reader curious enough to want to learn more. A reader who finishes your flyer and thinks I want to know more about that is your target. A reader who finishes and feels they already know enough has been given too much.

You choose the angle. The historical quest, the physics of light slowing down in matter, the fiber optic internet, or something else you found compelling about this experiment. Whatever angle you choose, your flyer should be honest, accurate, and surprising enough to make a non-scientist stop and read.

Telling a Scientific Story: The ABT Framework

Good science communication is not a list of facts. It is a story — and stories have a structure. One of the most useful and widely used structures in science communication is the ABT framework: And, But, Therefore.

Every compelling narrative has these three elements:

And sets up the world as it is. It gives context, establishes what we know, and draws the reader in. And connects ideas that belong together.
But introduces tension. Something is unknown, surprising, contradictory, or unresolved. But is where the story gets interesting — it is the reason anyone should care.
Therefore delivers the resolution. What was done, what was found, and why it matters. Therefore is the payoﬀ.

Without But, there is no story — just a list of facts. Without Therefore, there is no point. The But is the engine of the narrative.

Why this matters: A list of facts about your experiment will not move a non-scientist. A story that creates tension and resolves it will. The ABT structure is not a gimmick — it is how human beings naturally process and remember information.

Example

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist studying bacteria in the 1920s, and he was careful and methodical, and he kept his laboratory organized. But one morning he returned from vacation to find that a mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes — and around the mold, the bacteria were dead. Therefore Fleming investigated the mold, identified the compound it produced, and ultimately gave the world penicillin — one of the most important medical discoveries in human history, born from what looked like a ruined experiment.

Notice what the But does: it creates surprise, stakes, and forward momentum. The story would be nothing without it.

Your flyer should have an ABT spine. You do not need to use the words And, But, Therefore explicitly — in fact, good writers often don’t. But the structure should be there, shaping how the narrative moves from context to tension to resolution.

What Your Flyer Must Do

Tell a coherent, accurate story about this experiment using the ABT structure
Be written for a non-scientist audience — no unexplained jargon, no assumed physics background
Be visually engaging — a flyer that looks like a wall of text will not be read
Be honest about what the experiment did and did not show
Make the reader want to know more

What your flyer must not do:

Overstate what the experiment demonstrated
Explain so much that there is nothing left to be curious about
Include images that do not add meaning

Length and format: One page. Any tool you like — Word, Google Docs, Canva, PowerPoint, or anything else that produces a one-page document. Submit as a PDF.

Authorship and Attribution

Submit a separate brief note to D2L alongside your flyer identifying who contributed what to this assignment. Two or three sentences is enough. This is evidence for your grade proposal and mirrors standard practice in professional and scientific communication.

A Note on Learning Objectives

This flyer is an opportunity to demonstrate:

Communicating experimental results and their significance in a narrative structure appropriate to a general audience (objective 7)
Representing results honestly without overstating what the data shows (objective 8)
Connecting the physics of this experiment to its broader significance for society (overarching civic science objective)

A flyer that is visually polished but scientifically inaccurate does not demonstrate objective 8. A flyer that is accurate but impenetrable to a non-scientist does not demonstrate objective 7. Both matter.

Submission

Submit your flyer as a PDF and your authorship note as a separate document to D2L by the due date.