1. Opening circle (10 min)
Big circle: How do you feel now, what happened to you during the last week?
2. Who can this be? (10 min)
Volunteer participants act out a famous person, the others try to guess who that is.
3. Fame (25 min)
The facilitator encourages discussions about why the people who were presented in the previous exercise are famous. Have they done something worthwhile or are they just short-term celebrities? If they try to list famous people, how many scientists can they think of? Why do they first think of popstars or actors, and not scientists? What kind of values are behind this? Do they think show buisness, the art of entertainment is more important than sciences?
The participants work in groups. They get the names and short biographies in the Annex separately. Other scientists can be added who share the nationality of the participants, as they are more likely to have heard about them.
Their task is to pair each name with the right biography. If they have smart phones or tablets, they can gather more information about the scientists.
The groups choose a scientist (either from the exercise or someone they are interested in or respect) and write three questions they would like to ask if they could make an interview with that person.
The groups read out their questions in a big circle. The facilitator encourages a discussion about why it is important to have good questions and that in order to have good questions, one has to have a certain amount of knowledge on the subject.
4. Introduce yourself! (10 min)
Participants work in groups. They choose a famous person and write a short monologue in which this person introduces themselves whithout saying their name. They have to include clear hints without being too obvious. One participant in each group presents the monologue, the others try to guess who it can be.
5. Closing circle (5 min)
What are you taking away from this workshop? What was the best/ most difficult?
Which school subject would you connect this workshop to?
Annex
MARIE CURIE
(1867–1934) Polish-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. The first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
STEPHEN HAWKING
(1942 – 2018) English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. His theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He also worked with space-time singularities. He was diagnosed with a slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually paralysed him over the decades. After the loss of his speech, he communicated through a speech-generating device.
NIKOLA TESLA
(1856 – 1943) Serbian American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He also developed the three-phase system of electric power transmission. He immigrated to the United States in 1884. In 1891 he invented an induction coil widely used in radio technology.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
(1879 – 1955) German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. He is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.
ADA LOVELACE
(1815 – 1852) English mathematician. She has been called the first computer programmer. Even though she wrote about a computer, the Analytical Engine, that was never built, she realized that the computer could follow a series of simple instructions, a program, to perform a complex calculation.