After more than two decades, the very last children’s lecture at Nemo. “Always a party”
From “why does the earth turn round” to “do snakes also fart”: for over twenty years, UvA scientists came to science museum Nemo to answer questions from children. Due to dwindling visitor numbers, last Sunday the children’s lecture was held for the last time.
“Who likes chocolate?” Around forty hands shoot into the air as UvA physicist Corentin Coulais asks the question. It is Sunday morning and in a small theatre room in science museum Nemo, primary school-aged children are sitting with their parents to learn how to make the tastiest chocolate.
After asking, “Why do we actually like chocolate?”, they remain silent for a while. “Cocoa,” says one child. A boy talks about what the cocoa bean looks like inside. A girl wants to know: “Why is there a 3D printer over there?” The question seems off-topic, but has everything to do with Coulais’ lecture: delicious chocolate also depends on its structure. You can make it brittle or compact, Coulais demonstrates with wooden toy blocks, in the very last children’s lecture.
Because after more than two hundred children’s lectures, the show is over and the UvA and Nemo are working on a new format. What have these hundreds of lectures achieved and why were they created in the first place?
First children’s lecture
The first children’s lecture was held in 2001, a hundred years after the Nobel Prize was first awarded and UvA professor Jacobus Van ‘t Hoff-year was awarded one as well. To commemorate this, Nemo and the UvA started a collaboration inspired by the BBC’s Christmas Lectures, where scientists answer children’s science questions, illustrated with experiments.
This proved a success and from 2003 the children’s lectures were held ten times a year. The concept has remained unchanged all these years. However, the location did change: from a workshop room, the lecture moved to the large theatre hall with room for eighty children. Then to a smaller theatre hall and the lecture was held twice a day. There was also a covenant with Het Parool in the early years, and a report of the children’s lecture appeared in the newspaper as standard.
“We always aimed with the children’s lecture to make science more accessible and inclusive,” says Bart Groeneveld, communications advisor at FNWI. “There was a time when the first lecture was filled by default with children from the Museum Youth University (MJU) and Weekend Schools.”
“This is what is missing in education,” says the mother of Louise (7), a regular guest at the children’s lecture. “Especially for children with a developmental advantage. It gives depth and they see the whole picture, from the scientist himself to the equipment he works with, and so it comes alive. In addition, all learning styles are covered: slides, pictures, interaction, humour, quizzes. It raises questions in children.”
Whether Louise (7) will miss the children’s lecture? “I don’t know,” says Louise in all honesty. “Maybe I will.” In any case, a lot has stuck. For instance, she talks about ChatGPT, the topic of the previous lecture, where she learned that algorithms make mistakes too. And about dreams, that some people remember their dreams and others don’t.
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Nor is it only the children who learn something, so do the scientists. More than two hundred UvA scientists have already given the children’s lecture and almost everyone found it exciting, including physicist Coulais. “I have children myself and know how difficult it is to make science understandable to them.” Afterwards, they are often proud and scientists are only too happy to stick the annual Nemo children’s lecture programme on their office doors.
Counting bird sand
“The children’s lecture was really always a celebration,” recalls UvA guest researcher Rooske Franse, who collaborated as employee from Nemo on the children’s lecture from the beginning. “On all levels. It started with the conversation with the scientist about the child’s question. And then came the translation to the child, how can we really get the children to think with us and what experiments do we come up with in the process?”
In doing so, no topic was too abstract. With the lecture “How far can you count?” by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the challenge was to visualise “very large numbers”. Franse: “Then we filled glass containers with marbles, chocolate sprinkles and eventually bird sand. But it’s still science, of course: so we then sat and counted the number of grains of sand in a square centimetre of bird sand to get an estimate of how many grains of sandwere in the container.”
The lecture on chocolate did not happen overnight either. The UvA’s Technology Centre (TC) helped to create ingenious structures for the children with the 3D printer and edible varieties of chocolate. These the children got to taste and compare with a “regular” piece of chocolate. “The brittle chocolate was much softer and smoother,” says Julian (11). He is attending the children’s lecture for the first time with his father. They both love chocolate and came to Nemo for that reason.
Declining visitor numbers
In recent years, attendance at the children’s lectures has been declining. There were lectures where there were only 10 children in the room. The corona pandemic did not help. That was a tough period for Nemo, which depends on visitors and events for 80 per cent of its income. Last year, the Museum Youth University (MJU) also stopped participating and children stopped coming to the lectures. And so the question arose: how long is the children’s lectures viable in this form?
Not only the number of visitors played a part in that consideration, but also the preparation time of the lecture, which is often held only once and is often separate from Nemo’s programming. That is why the UvA and Nemo are working on a new format, a larger event that will be organised a few times a year around a topical theme and promoted online and offline.
“We think that such an event can have more appeal,” says Annemarie van Eekeren, head of presentation and collection at Nemo, “and that it will give us a wider reach.” This will start from June, when Nemo’s green roof opens. Multiple workshops, activities and lectures will then be organised around a theme such as biodiversity. “The interaction between children and scientist has to be there,” says Van Eekeren. “But afterwards, you can also do a scavenger hunt on Nemo’s new roof, for instance.”
