This has been all over the web in the last couple of weeks, but it should be here too. Neat trick.
There’s an Instructable to go with the film.
When preparing science media for children…
When preparing science media for children, treat the children with the utmost respect and be playful with the science.
Too often, I see this done the other way around. Which is wrong on both counts. This is one of those things which is at once staggeringly obvious, and deceptively subtle.
Electric Semolina
- I hope that most school children get to see that sprinkling iron filings around a bar magnet produces a pattern which shows the shape of the magnetic field around the magnet. It’s a very simple, yet useful, way of making something invisible, visible. What many school children won’t get to see is that you can do something very similar with electric fields, using semolina instead of iron filings. The picture above is from a demonstration I showed my year 13 (A-level) students last week – the instructions for how to set it up can be found at the Practical Physics site.
A tip: it’s lovely for the students to see this for themselves, but the apparatus is tiny so use a camera to project it onto your whiteboard as well. I forgot to take my webcam into school so I used my phone to take a photo and put that up on the whiteboard so we could look at the demonstration closely and discuss it. I encouraged my students to take photos too, as I did when we investigated magnetic fields – I’m not convinced getting students to draw what they see is terribly useful in this case. What do you think?
Performance range
I keep forgetting that this blog can be about performance skills as well as, you know, demos. Here we go (this really starts around the 40 second mark):
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/af8af15b6c/obamacare-or-shut-up-with-billy-eichner-and-olivia-wilde
Not science. Not a demonstration. But look at the range of ways Wilde says ‘Shut up!’. Impressive.
ScienceDemo blogger Elin Roberts has an exercise/game (once memorably, if incongruously, played in the library of the Royal Institution) called ‘Sandeels.’ The construction is that all participants are puffins, and that puffins have very limited vocabulary and topics of conversation. Specifically, the only thing they ever discuss – and the only word they know – is ‘sandeels.’ Players take a card which specifies an emotion or mood, and have to perform that emotion using only the word ‘sandeels.’ Ian Simmons’ ‘cantankerous’ puffin is a sight to behold.
These sorts of exercises are useful for exploring our range as performers, and they help us think about the details of how we deliver demonstrations.
Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi…
As may have been mentioned, I’m in Abu Dhabi for a month helping train the hundreds of science communicators who will staff the Science Festival here in November. It’s a huge project run by Edinburgh International Science Festival – exhausting, but tremendously rewarding.
This week, one of the universities with which we worked was a teacher training college. As I found last year, it’s a pleasure to work with tremendously capable Emirati women and introduce them to perhaps a slightly different way of interacting with their audiences. The parallels and differences between science communication and conventional classroom practice are fascinating.
At one point we found ourselves discussing demonstrations, and how they might best be used. “Ask the audience to predict what they think’s going to happen!” cried one happy participant. “Yes!” continued another, “Then observe what actually happens, and ask them to explain why.”
Predict/Observe/Explain, it turns out, is quite the thing at this particular college. Cool.
The Leidenfrost Maze
Many of us stumble upon the Leidenfrost Effect accidentally when cooking. The 2010 winner of the SciCast Best Physics film is one of the best short films on the subject I’ve seen, but the video above, also made by students, introduced me to a surprising new effect related to it. I’m pretty sure Jonathan, who’s away in Abu Dhabi at the moment, is going to love it.
Can you name this sunflower?
- You might remember this sunflower from the production diary. It’s suddenly rather important that I know exactly what it is, for labelling purposes.
Trouble is, the closest I come to botany is chopping plants up and cooking them. I did once meet somebody whose rather fabulous job was to identify daisies, but as dates go it wasn’t the most successful so – tragically – I no longer have her number.
Bohemian Gravity
Not a demo, and my string theory is nowhere near good enough to keep up, but when there’s this much work involved I can’t hold any of that against the creator. Heck of a job, this.
Why are science demonstrations important?
Science demonstrations are often criticised for their passive nature, their gratuitous exploitation and their limited ability to develop scientific knowledge and understanding. In some of today’s active-learning-obsessed classrooms, demonstrations are getting a bad reputation compared to their hands-on equivalents.
I’m passionate about the power of science demos in, and out, of the classroom. For me, demonstrations can be emotionally engaging science theatre. Their unique power lies, like theatre, in their impact on the communal emotional engagement and focus of the audience. Demonstrations have enormous potential to:
- create and sustain interest
- stimulate curiosity
- communicate and share emotions
- reveal phenomena by showing, not just telling
- direct focus
- develop scientific thinking skills, and
- provoke further interaction, thought and discussion.
I’ve tried to capture a rationale for the benefits of science demonstrations in this paper written for science teachers, but much of this applies to the demos performed by science communicators too.
So why are science demonstrations important to you?
Robin Millar on Radio 4
Last week, Alom was on Inside Science – the new Radio 4 science strand, hosted by Adam Rutherford – talking about practical work. He wasn’t wildly happy with the way the piece turned out, but apparently the public response to the item was terrific. Which, you know, could be taken either way.
Anyway, this week the show has Robin Millar from the University of York speaking on the same subject. Before we headed to the US, we stopped off in York and interviewed Robin and his colleague Mary Whitehouse for the Demo Documentary – we’re very happy with the way that interview turned out, Robin and Mary are real gurus of this stuff.
If you’re in the UK you can do the ‘listen again’ thing: Inside Science, Thursday 12th September 2013.