Scienceshow/Introduction

Natural sciences are both entertaining and educative - and science shows is all about awakening the curiosity for the natural sciences. There are many initiatives around the world for this.

This book is about how you can perform or teach others to perform scientific experiments in a safe and 'edutaining' way, with emphasis on ensuring people learn something on the way.

We hope that these experiments give teachers and students as much pleasure as they have given the thousands of people we have shown them to so far.

With help from the Wiki system, we hope to achieve an easy and quick reviewing and updating of the guides and recipes for the experiments, as well as a lot of people participating in developing new experiments and giving a good description of these. In addition the wiki system makes it possible to have a discussion running about the content of the book, so where optimizations and problems can be shared. Finally wiki makes is possible to share the content in various languages - this english version will hopefully quickly expand faster than the Danish version I have started based on our show notes.

A possible problem is if people start changing the contents of recipes so they don't work or become dangerous. This is avoided by eveyone carefully following rule No 1 for experimental work:

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.

(Epictetus, Discourses IV)

In wiki books you can also follow the history of changes to a page and the discussion - and everyone can correct the mistakes and typos. The disadvantage of occasional vandalism is by far overwun^{[check spelling]} by all the people who will contribute to make everything as good as possible - as in the marvellous Wikipedia.

How YOU can contribute to the book edit

If you want to add a guide to an experiment or recipe then edit in the page 'Guides' and insert a link to the comming new guide where it's appropriate in the index.

The link should look like this:

[[Scienceshow/Guides/Title on the new page| Title on the new page]]

Do not use abbreviations but write everything out in full. Check your addition by looking at the preview and then save it when you're satisfied.

Press on the link you have just made and then you'll come to your new and fresh page you can edit.

Cut n' paste from Template for new guide to ensure you get all the sub-sections in the new page.

Maybe you don't have time to add text to all the sections - but you can get that later and others will hopefully also help. It's probably a good idea to keep most of the points, even if you think some seem pointless - its important to tell newbies that an experiments is in fact considered harmless, and to explain them how ridiculesly harmless the most harmless part of it is. This will make them feel safe about testing the experiment.

Once the page has been made, you can add links to it in the subject areas or include it in descriptions of longer show series there.

Wikimedia Commons ScienceShow is where we upload the media files for this book

Science Shows Around the World edit

Some shows only cover a single subject, such as physics, but the hope with this book is to create a source for all subjects, since many experiments are cross disciplinary and science as such seems to be moving towards a higher degree of cross disciplinarity.

Please add shows you know of to this list:

Wiki Science Show History edit

The book was started by Kristian Molhave (wiki user page) 12. Oct. 2005. In the coming time I'll begin adding descriptions of experiments based on the descriptions we have in danish. There's a Wiki Science show book in Danish as well. I do hope others will begin to join the work too :-)

Good Entertainment and Good Education edit

A show is not just entertainment but educating entertainment aiming at inspiring and activating people.

I hope you will contribute!!