Greetings everyone!

Well I figured I should hurry up and start my blog, and I'll fix the template to something more exciting later.

So, welcome to Experiments, Explosions and Elephants!

I plan to post regularly to make it easier on my followers. The plan is to post on Mondays and Fridays - a great note to start and end your working week with. So keep an eye (or an RSS feed) open on Friday.


I would like to begin with some thoughts on science presenting, as this is what I am most interested in, and what this blog will primarily be about.

This last week in Australia was National Science Week. It used to be combined with Science Festival, but this year they split them. I'm not sure why, but at least it gave science more publicity - two weeks dedicated to science awareness. :) Although on the other hand, splitting one whizz bang event into two doesn't give two wizz bang events. At least not yet.

As I am doing a science media course this semester, our assignment was to attend a NSW (National Science Week, not New South Wales, in this case) event on assignment (word duplication intended for effect), and write a news article about it.

I attended the 'Just Add Water' presentation by Dr Peter Wothers last Tuesday. Dr Wothers is from the University of Cambridge in the UK and had been presenting public science lectures for 10 years. This lecture was for school students in years 7-10 (he ran repeats for years 11-12, and the general public later in the week) and schools from all over Australia attended (well, I saw at least one from Melbourne and Sydney). It was very good and included lots of explosions (hydrogen balloons + fire = awesome explosion) and fires (sodium oxide and water on rice bubbles), which everyone loved.


From a potential future science presenter, or at least as a person imensely interested in the topic, I felt that he was good at communicating with the audience, particularly for the high school students. The worst elements were the late start (20 minutes) and the cluttered set (which can be excused to a degree given that they were improvising some equipment from the ANU Chemistry department. But I do think a good, well thought-out set will emphasise the presentation, compared to a cluttered set up which distracts). He knew his stuff (as you'd hope he would with such an intense background in chemistry) and knew how to commmunicate it clearly.

Importantly, Dr Wothers made it exciting. I think this is vital for communicating to kids or teenagers. Adults too, but I want to focus on children. I'm sure everyone will agree that there's nothing like a good explosion to attract kids to science. There's nothing wrong with using 'flashy demonstrations' to grab attention. Sure, it's not a totally realistic portrayel of science, but kids will realise that as they become more serious about science. If they start off believeing that science is fun and exciting, then hopefully they will continue to find it exciting, even the parts that aren't so flashy, per-say.

The Excited Particles at Questacon also use this technique. They are very fond of hydrogen explosions, and use them whenever they can get away with it. The slogan of Questacon is 'Making Science Fun', and demonstrating the flashy elements equates to fun, I think.

Its ok to use entertainment when communicating science. People are after entertainment more than straight facts (no matter how much we hope for the contrary), and will remember what they learned better if they can relate the information to explosions and fires. And if all they remember in 2 weeks is that hydrogen explodes, then at least they learnt something.

So go on, explode something. You know you want to.



On a side note: my news report of the event has been accepted by the ANU media centre for publication. It will appear on the ANU website and in the ANU On Campus Newsletter. I'll post a link to it when it appears. :)