After a long train ride, I find myself at the Antwerp central station. It's not hard to find Sus; with his white beard, thin-framed glasses and rosy cheeks, he describes himself as a typical professor pulled from a comic book. This image becomes even stronger as we try to find a spot to sit in the city. Like a true professor, he gives an excited and chaotic account of Antwerp's city history, pointing out the finest details of surrounding buildings and sharing all of his favourite spots for Belgian fries.

Sus Dams is well known in Flanders - the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium - for the science shows he organises for primary school children. Throughout the region, he visits many schools, local theatres and dedicated science academies. There, he organises events where children can enjoy all sorts of activities surrounding science and technology; from extracting their own DNA, to welding and watching explosions. All this is aimed to get the children excited about science.

But Sus' fame does not end at the Belgian border. He also works closely with Stichting Rino, a student organisation from Leiden University where students perform spectacular physics shows with freezing cold liquids. In exchange for Rino's performances in Sus' science events, he helps them reach the audience of primary school children.

Together with Ilse Hordijk, a previous board member of Rino and a good friend of Sus, I meet him in Antwerp to learn how he helped change the entire science popularisation landscape in Flanders, and what students from Leiden can learn from him.

Saving a failing mission

Sus does most of his work through Natuur en Wetenschap VZW (in English, ‘Nature and Science’), a non-profit organisation that organises science events for youth and schools throughout Belgium to get children enthusiastic about science. Before he got involved in the organisation, most of these events were aimed at high school students: "all of the members were high school science teachers, who mostly organised after-school activities." This meant that the organisation was only reaching students who were enrolled in science electives, and therefore were already interested in science. "It became rapidly clear that they were failing their mission."

"I am a graphic designer by trade, and didn't have anything to do with science," Sus explains. When he joined Natuur en Wetenschap VZW, he was asked to help with the visuals in a science magazine that the organisation was developing for students. As he worked there, he and some other coworkers realised that the organisation needed to change course. "We wanted to look for an audience where we could make a difference. An audience that doesn't know what science is, so we can get them interested in science."

One group of people that fits this picture is young children. "Eventually, this led us to children in primary schools, aged 10 to 12."

Having found their target audience, Sus and his team drafted some projects and took them to the Belgian Ministry of Science Policy. "But when we told them we wanted to take science to primary schools, they simply laughed at us." Clearly, the ministry didn't believe that Sus' idea would work at the time. Still, he pushed through, and his efforts were rewarded. "These days, almost all science popularisation efforts in Flanders are aimed at our audience."

Bringing science to life

Over the next few years, Sus organised several spectacular science shows, where Flemish children could get excited about science after school. Eventually, the success of these shows got more attention from higher up.

"At some point," Sus explains, "the Flemish government had a wonderful idea. They said: ‘we have too few people working in science.’" To remedy this, they wanted to create STEM-academies, to let children discover science. "Just like how every town has academies for music and drawing, where children can work on their hobbies outside of school. However, they forgot about one little detail: there was no money for these academies." So, these academies had to be run by amateurs from the municipalities, who needed to figure out everything on their own. "That did not work," Sus sighs.

As the government realised this, they decided to step in again. "There was an even more luminous idea, because we have incredibly expert politicians. A wonderful adjustment: it became mandatory for all municipalities to have STEM-academies. There was still no money." In a single municipality, there might be twelve hundred primary schoolers. Without any money or expertise, they couldn't provide for the entire target audience.

So Sus convinced several municipalities to work with him. "We [at Natuur en Wetenschap VZW] got a lot of money from the ministry for our projects, and so we promised that 50% of the children we reached would enroll in our after-school activities. If you want to get subsidised here in Flanders, you have to be able to exaggerate,” Sus winks conspiratorily. “Of course, 50% was completely unreasonable. But for the third year in a row, we convinced 70% of the children we spoke to to join a science project. In those five municipalities, we now have 31 STEM-academies."

Science in Flanders and in Leiden

On our side of the border, several different organisations work to popularise science among children. One such group is the student led Stichting Rino from Leiden. Several times each week, students from Rino travel to high schools throughout the country to show experiments. They conjure big clouds from kettles, shoot corks against ceilings and make delicious ice cream with liquid nitrogen. Their goal is to get high school pupils excited to pick more scientific courses.

If you've walked around the university’s science campus, you have likely seen the big clouds they conjure, heard the bang of a cork shooting against the ceiling, or tasted their nitrogen ice cream. Several times every week, students from Rino travel to high schools throughout the country to show experiments and enthuse school pupils to choose a scientific direction.

It is no surprise then, that they also work closely together with Sus. In exchange for a few performances per year in theatres near Antwerp, Sus speaks at Rino's events in Leiden. He also advises them on organising events for the target audience of primary schoolers.

Last year, Stichting Rino organised their own science show called Wetenschapswonders ( ‘Science Wonders’) for group 7 children (10 to 11 year olds) in the region. Although they were happy with the results, there were still some points left for improvement. "If you're talking to children, you have to make sure they keep their attention. Once you lose that, it's all over,” Sus notes. “That is something they noticed during Wetenschapswonders.” Nonetheless, he was quite impressed with their work: "I don't think Rino realises how good they are."

Sus and Rino have been working together for longer than he can remember. He seems eager to keep the collaboration going. "They can become role models to those children, if they do their job well."