Transcriber: Einat Sprinzak Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
Imagine celebrating your birthday
and getting a wonderful helium balloon.
What would it look like
if we now transfer your birthday to the Moon?
What would happen?
What would happen to the helium balloon?
So let me show you what I think would happen.
I'll just get...
Let's try out things on the Earth first.
(Pantomiming)
And now let's try out things on the Moon.
(Pantomiming)
(Laughter)
(Pantomiming)
(Laughter)
(Pantomiming)
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you.
So, what you just saw now
is how I teach students and teachers about gravity.
And I will show you that you could do something similar
in your classes as well.
So my name is Ran, Ran Peleg, and I studied chemical engineering.
And then I made a swift transition and became a dancer,
and then an actor and then a mime artist.
Now to me it was a very natural transition.
But I know that for most people if this is the world of science,
and this is the world of drama and theater,
these worlds are completely apart.
And I know this because when I told people
that I was a chemical engineer and now I'm a dancer,
I often got a raised eyebrow.
But to me these two worlds have always been in synergy.
Because I've always felt that the tools I needed
to imagine molecules moving around
in a chemical reaction or in a balloon,
were the same tools that I needed to imagine other dancers on the stage
or to imagine a choreography.
So today I am a science educator,
and I am intrigued by the question
of how can we tap into the energy, into the synergy,
between drama and science for the benefit of our students.
So if there's a synergy,
can we not take tools from the world of drama
into our science classroom to better engage our students?
And this was the topic of my PhD research,
and I strongly believe that it can.
I strongly I believe that bringing drama to the science classroom
can benefit our students and can think in an interdisciplinary manner.
It can help them solve problems creatively.
It can promote their communication skills,
and their presentation skills.
A few months ago I gave a workshop
in a science teachers conference,
and in fact it was right here in this very auditorium.
And I showed them the mime piece that you just saw.
After the workshop,
a very experienced science teacher came up to me.
And he asked me about this helium balloon
that you just saw.
Would it really behave the way I showed it would?
And what would happen if there was an atmosphere on the Moon?
What would happen to the balloon?
For example, if a spaceship just landed on the Moon
and it had air in it,
would it still behave the same?
Now this is a very experienced science teacher,
and he has seen thousands of physics problems before.
But seeing this balloon embodied on the stage
made him revise his understanding,
made him revisit the laws of physics
and think about what would happen.
But what was more amazing is that when we talked about
what would happen to the helium balloon,
we actually used this balloon that never existed,
this imaginary balloon.
And so we moved it around, and we poked at it
and showed the different forces acting on it.
So, this is one of the great things drama does:
it helps embody knowledge,
it helps bring knowledge into our bodies.
So we can experience a phenomenon not just by seeing it,
like we normally do in the science class, but by actually being it.
And why does this work?
Because we all think with our bodies,
at least to some extent.
So think of the last time you had to memorize a long speech,
for example, for a TEDx event, or you had some problems at work
or with the family.
So I'm sure some of you got out of your seats
and went walking around the room,
talking to yourself, moving your arms.
Perhaps going for a walk in the park,
or perhaps just at home moving objects around.
Why do we do that?
Research has shown that areas in the brain
that are in charge of moving and sensing the world
are also activated when we think,
and when we learn, and when we solve problems.
Even if we think about something
as abstract as physics or chemistry.
So with this in mind, I want my students
to move their learning, to choreograph their problem solving.
Now, I'm aware that maybe most of you aren't mime artists.
That's fine.
But you could still bring the power of drama
to your science classroom.
Because drama has many aspects.
And one of them is movement and mime like I just showed you.
But another very powerful aspect of drama is the story, or story telling.
Because stories can spark our imagination;
they can ignite our emotions; they can captivate us.
So here at the Weizmann Institute of Science, we have a project
that tries to harness the power of stories
into our teaching,
and into teaching children or students about inquiry.
So let me show you an example.
This example is about hydrophobicity,
the phenomenon of hydrophobicity.
It has to do with molecules, water, hydrogen bonding,
intermolecular forces and intramolecular forces.
So as appealing as all of this may sound,
let me show you what we do with our students.
What I do with the students is that I tell them about James,
the story of James.
James is an old friend of mine.
I've known him ever since kindergarten.
And ever since kindergarten
James was infatuated with building sand castles.
So he was always out in the schoolyard building sand castles.
And they always got bigger and bigger, and more elaborated,
and he put in fairy tale figures, and he put in animals
and Snow-White and the seven dwarfs.
So you can just imagine how big they got
and how elaborated they got.
And he went on doing it when he was a teenager
and when he was an adult.
So you can imagine his excitement
when I called him up a couple of weeks ago and said:
"James, I think I saw an ad
for a sand castle building competition on the beach in Tel-Aviv."
So before I managed to say that I heard the phone dropped,
he got into the car; he drove to the beach,
and he went to sign up for the competition.
Now he was given two options:
option one was a normal competition,
option two was a more advanced one,
a special one, and with a higher prize money.
So which one do you think he went for?
Of course he went for the second one, for the special one,
with his experience and talent, why wouldn't he?
So he went down to the beach, and he got a little plot of sand;
he stretched out, went to get a bucket of water.
He got the water, pour over the sand,
and then something strange happened.
Let me show you what happened.
(Pouring water onto the sand)
So the sand just wouldn't absorb any of the water.
And if the sand stays dry,
how could it possibly stick,
and how could he possibly make a sand castle out of it?
Now the story has a happy end,
but we don't tell it to our students yet.
And this is where we stop the story,
and we hand over the mystery to our students.
I can tell you in secret that this is a special sand.
It is a sand that is produced here in Israel.
It is coated with a special hydrophobic material,
a material that repels water, a bit like oil does.
But the students don't know that,
and they have to find out
how to build a sand castle from this sand.
Now I have another little confession to make:
James isn't real.
(Laughter)
We made him up.
But for the students he is real enough.
So bringing James into the classroom
got them motivated, got them enthusiastic;
they tried different ways of getting the sand to stick together.
They built loads of castles;
they even developed methodologies
in which they could test which castle was more stable.
And they wanted to talk to James on their Facebook page.
They wanted him to join their classroom Facebook page.
And probably, most importantly, they stayed in the break
to try to finish more experiments,
and see which sand castle was the best.
So I hope I just showed you
that stories can spark our students' imaginations.
They can ignite their emotions,
and they can captivate them into learning and into inquiry.
So today, in my talk, I just told you about mime,
and I just told you about drama.
Mime and drama are my favorite art forms.
And that's why I choose to bring them to my students.
That’'s why I choose to bring them to teachers,
And that's why I chose to bring them to this event.
I realize that not all teachers can become
actors or dancers or mime artists.
But I strongly believe that all teachers are talented;
all teachers have an amazing imagination;
all teachers can take their talent.
They should bring their talent to the classroom.
They should bring their passion to the classroom.
Because I believe that this is the most important lesson
which we can give our kids.
Thank you.
(Applause)