Einstein Goes to School

Mercury, July/August 2005 Table of Contents

Courtesy of E. A. S. Larrea

by Erik Aris Stengler Larrea

Relativity? At school? There are many such skeptical responses when we mention the possibility of organizing some activities around Einstein and his work for the higher secondary level classes. But we may be proud to say that we have proven those skeptics wrong. Not only have we taken Einstein to the schools: it has had such a success that the activities have been stretched over several months beyond the initial schedule, due to the high demand.

It all began early in 2004, when the Education and Public Outreach staff of the Fundación Canaria Orotava para la Historia de la Ciencia (Canarian Foundation “Orotava” for the History of Science, in short, hereafter, “the Foundation”) started to plan the activities for the course 2004/05. Inevitably, the fact that 2005 was to be the world year of Physics came up and it was decided that the focus of the course would be on Einstein. The project was called “Einstein at School” and included a wide variety of activities, all designed to convey to students and teachers the meaning of Einstein’s Theories of Relativity as well as their historical, social, cultural and scientific contexts. It was thought that if this goal was achieved for those participating in one way or another, a long way would have been covered to spark their interest for these topics and towards overcoming their reluctance against these subjects—caused mainly because the mathematical framework is so often allowed to get too much in the foreground, clouding the view of the Theories’ real significance and fascinating nature.

So, leaving formulae and equations out of the game, a “package” of activities was designed and offered to secondary schools of Tenerife and the other islands of Spain’s Canarian Archipelago. “Einstein at School” consists of a week in which a particular school hosts an exhibition on the social, cultural, philosophical and scientific contexts in Einstein’s times, a couple of introductory talks given by staff of the Foundation, a set of experiments designed and performed in the school by the staff of the Science Museum, a visit to the latter’s Planetarium for a special show on the changing views of the Cosmos since the times of classical Greece, and a theater play on the changing world views of Physics, which the students themselves are expected to perform by the end of the week under the supervision of the performing arts teacher.

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