Explaining light, without words

In my time in the UK I did quite a bit of astronomy outreach work – like public observatory tours, helping out with masterclasses for teenagers and a stint at the BBC – and found it a really enjoyable way of talking about my subject to lots of different people. As any astronomer with experience in these kinds of activities can tell you, the variety of people with an interest in astronomy is really amazing. Some are incredibly knowledgeable and spend hours at their own telescopes, some think it’s all a load of shit, others suspect “astronomy” is a government conspiracy, others yet are simply a bit curious about the odd-shaped building or dish thing they drive past every day. But it’s the kids who surprised me the most: they might just stand there looking bored, and then suddenly ask a question so insightful that you wish you’d thought to ask last week’s colloquium speaker.

A year ago, when I realised that I hadn’t really done any outreach since moving to the Netherlands, I decided to see if I could get back into it. I teamed up with my friend Carolina Ödman, who manages the Universe Awareness programme from Leiden, and we put together a plan to design a simple game for young children that introduces them to concepts about light and radiation from space and here on Earth. I successfully applied for a small outreach grant to SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering, of which I’m a member, and off we were.

Carolina and I have had a few sessions working on the game, which will have a very simple snakes & ladders format. The basic story is a photon travelling through space towards the telescope on Earth, encountering different situations: he gets lost in a dark cloud, is scattered off course by some dust grains, picks up some extra energy in a nebula, and has to make it through the Earth’s atmosphere. To accompany the game, we’ll make a poster about the electromagnetic spectrum, some info cards about basic concepts to do with light and radiation, and a teachers’ information booklet. We’ll also include a cut-out template and diffraction grating to let children see the visible light spectrum with their own handheld spectroscope.

The tricky part is that, as this is aimed at children between 4 and 10 all over world, we’re not using any words, anywhere. Only the inormation booklet for teachers will be text-based, and this we’ll get translated into several languages. Conveying scientific concepts in a way that young kids can understand, without using any language, is really quite hard. While I’ll contribute on the organisational side and providing content for the information booklet, the real challenge lies in the graphical design and use of images.

We’re planning to distribute the game amongst the Universe Awareness community, which is spread over five continents. The aim of Universe Awareness is to give young kids a first look into the vastness of the world and the Universe, to encourage them to engage with the things they see around them, and generally introduce them to very basic scientific concepts like the Earth, the Sun and the solar system. What I like about UNAWE is their community-driven approach: rather than carry out “projects” in a traditional, organised and rigid way, UNAWE is more about ideas and creating connections between communities, sometimes with a little help on the technological front, that would otherwise not have the opportunity to communicate. So projects are created by anyone in the community, and UNAWE helps source funding to set things up and connect people with projects.

I’d like to have a similar approach with this optics game. The lack of text-based content should allow teachers to adapt the materials to their needs and style of teaching. The grant we have can pay for an initial production run of around 1000 copies – and I hope that the UNAWE community’s experience will help us change it, and make it better. Because, let’s face it, what do I know about teaching 4-year olds..?

If you have any experience with developing science-based games for very young children, you have ideas or you’ve seen good or bad examples, I’d love to hear about it – so please get in touch!