• Question: What about your school talks will be different from others?

    Asked by 268spea48 to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      At the moment I am trying to develop a board game that can be used in school talks. Most of my school talks have been about the subject of sustainability and me and some friends are currently working on a game, where the student will be able to take control of their city. Every round the player would have to make a decision about the future of his city, and after the decision we will talk about the effects of his decision and how his city is faring. Ofc, there will be turns and twists throughout the game where fuel prices might be going up/ down, diseases and recessions.

      So, at the end of the day my talks would be a game in which the students can enjoy themselves while learning something new.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I’d bring some pretty cool demonstrations and experiments! I don’t know about you, but I love experiments that fizz and pop and change colour! So I’d bring as many practicals as I could carry and make sure there was enough for everyone to have a go! Also, we have a dry ice canon that can be fired across rooms!

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Any talks I do in schools are fairly straight-talking! I try to not do the old ‘fizz-bang’ chemistry experiments – my philosophy is that showing explosions doesn’t fairly represent chemistry – if your experiment goes *BANG* then something has gone badly wrong!

      The story of fluorescence, the magic of what happens to an electron when it is tickled by a photon, plenty of audience participation and, of course, glowsticks!
      Does that make it different from others? I’m not sure, but every science communicator will have a different story to tell, even if they are talking about the same subject.

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I would use light of different colours to demonstrate how it interacts with matter and how a spectrum (e.g. emission spectrum of the sun) can be measured and what information we get

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