Science Workshop Fun at Archbishop Runcie

Hello to all ASTEROID fans out there! We are excited to bring you another update on a recent science workshop we delivered. This time, it was with our lovely friends over at Archbishop Runcie school!

I think we can all agree on how fun and interesting Science can be, and there’s nothing we love more than learning new scientific knowledge by playing some exciting games and taking part in fun activities! On our recent visit to Archbishop Runcie School, we brought some vision and memory-themed activities for everyone to enjoy.

At the start of the workshop, everyone was introduced to our friend Adam. If you look at his picture below, you’ll see something quite unusual about him…

Using Adam, we talked about our brain and two of the things we need it for: to see and to remember things. Everyone then took turns to take part in our carousel activities:

1) Making Shadows
Here, we learnt about how shadows are made – by an object or shape blocking the light that travels from a light source, such as a torch, a lamp, or even the sun! We then used a lamp and a homemade shadow puppet theatre show to play a fun game using shadow puppets. We acted out some famous nursery rhymes, and everyone guessed what they could be based on what they could see! Below are some of the puppets we used. Could you guess which nursery rhymes they could be?

2) Boundary Extension Drawing Game
Here, we looked at a picture of a scene. In the scene was a teddy bear sitting on a step. We then hid it away and tried to draw the scene from memory. Afterwards, we brought back the picture and compared it to our own drawings. We found that a lot of us drew the background of the scene as bigger than in the original photo. We learnt that this is due to a phenomenon called “The Boundary Extension Error”. This happens because our brain understands scenes as part of a continuous world and so we are not limited to objects right in front of our eyes. So, when we are asked to remember a scene, we tend to include a lot of the background!

3) Copying Game
During this activity, we all sat around a circle and took turns performing an action, such as patting our heads. However, every time an action was performed, the next person had to perform a new action on top of the one before. This created a sequence of actions, that became harder and harder to remember! This showed us that our memory has limits, and after some time we will start to forget things!

4) Scene Drawing Game
For our final activity, we listened to a story and then drew objects based on that story. Afterwards, we compared our drawings to demonstrate how our brains imagine scenes and object differently to each other!

Everyone seemed to enjoy the activities we had in store. Not only that, but we also learnt more about how we see and how we remember things.

That’s our update for today! Keep your eyes peeled for another instalment of our blog, coming soon!

By Therese

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