I saw the show today @ BETT despite the technical difficulties Frana was amazing!!!

In reply to Bantammenace.

Students don’t have some finite store of learndrenalin that gets consumed by lessons full of exploding gases and Van der Graaf generators and Coke ‘n’ Mentos rockets that then makes them all lethargic when it comes to “informative and interesting” learning. Good teachers have a magic porridge pot of pedagogical skills and shenanigans — that would fry the brains of mere mortals should they dare open it’s sticky lid — and over the course of a term they use them all. Of course in one lesson they might pop balloons…

As for what I think of fun and teaching, @tombennett71 says it much better than I can:

“Can learning be fun? Of course. Is learning sometimes fun? Undoubtedly. Should it be fun? That’s a whole different question. Simply saying yes damns every act of learning that isn’t enjoyable, and you would have to be completely bonkers to think that everything you learn should be fun as well. Almost everything worth achieving requires sweat, grit and the ability to stick with something when it’s hard – also qualities I’d like to see in my students in general. I don’t want them bored, but I have no problem if something they do is boring, if it’s necessary. I want them to plug away at problems until they break through: that’s the pleasure, and it’s worth its weight in diamonds.”

This maybe a reflection of our adversarial justice system or the televisation of Prime Minister’s question time. To be honest, the reasons are fairly irrelevant.

Just try and be nice and set a good example for the adults of tomorrow, otherwise nothing will change, and the art of discussion will be left in the hands of an enlightened minority, while the majority will just slag one another off as they’ve been taught to do.

We’ll need you over in the electric eel post right away to make some fish puns.

You’re right – this kind of conversation does make some people a bit upset. Teachers we’ve spoken to (and we speak to a lot) are pretty wary of taking part in discussions like this, in large part because there’s a significant body of people out there who, because they were once pupils or are now the parents of pupils, believe they have as much understanding of pedagogy, educational science and classroom technique as teachers do, and it’s not much fun having your own expertise and 巜交换做爰2伦理法国 dismissed.

btw I’m not a teacher. Its interesting to see how the discussion does seem to have got some people a little bit vexed. I’m just a parent who wondered whether this kind of thing has a lasting impact. I fear that students may be switched off when their subsequent lessons don’t reach such heady heights. To gloss over the heavy-lifting may not do anyone any good in the long run. Give me informative and interesting over exciting anyday, but thats my problem…I’ll leave it to the experts to slug it out.

It were all fields when I were a lad…

I wouldn’t have put it like Ed but can understand his frustration: sweeping generalisations about teachers, kids and learning really don’t help any argument you are trying to make. Much more helpful and interesting are posts like yours, Hove’s and Stewart’s that make specific points. So thanks! :)

I had a CD case out and was projecting a real time Skype of a far off relative into “thin air” within minutes. Kids were literally squealing and jumping around.
It was so easy and with such effective results, I can only thank them for demonstrating that.

I am not sure that it is helpful to hurl derision at people because of differing viewpoints (but it is quite amusing).

To me education and fun should go hand-in-hand. Sometimes you need to do the “boring stuff”, but the more times you can present educational material in a fun way the better, TV and live shows provide a great way of doing that.

There is only so much that can be done on television, and the most important thing they can do is to get children enthused in science and technology. I’m talking from a parent point of view although I do help out at local schools and have seen some good examples of fun experiments / activities in classrooms as well.

I sat and watched through the lectures with my two children aged 6 and 9 and both of them were amazed by what they saw in the show.

After the show they wanted to do some of the experiments at home and fortunately most of the experiments can be repeated, although perhaps on a smaller scale (would be hard to rewire the Shell building for a “home” experiment).

We’d already done some Makey Makey activities, but one thing that they did like was the VR demonstration. So straight after the show I ordered a Google Cardboard and we’ve had fun following the roller coaster which is very similar to the demo on TV.

The one thing that I think would be good would be to have a “do try this at home guide” that could be downloaded from their website – which explains more about the theory and provides more details about the experiments. Even without that it doesn’t take much “googling” to find similar experiments that can be done at home. There are also a load of examples of examples on the 城中村勾搭老熟女啪啪 Pi website (eg. http://www.aabc式的四字词语.org/resources/make/ ) that provide other activities that can easily be done at home and are just as much fun as the ones on the TV.

In terms of the explosions show then I think they are amazing. I haven’t seen the #error404 one one, but I took my daughter along to a different one at the Big Bang Fair last year ( http://www.thebigbangfair.co.uk/ ) and she had a great time. She loved watching the show and I’m sure learned more than if it was presented as just theory. Unfortunately it’s not quite so easy (and sometimes far too dangerous) to repeat those experiments at home, but watching them in a live show is very impressive.