The brief
Create a short animation (no more than 90 seconds) that will capture the imagination of 8-14-year-olds, taking the bizarre, wonderful, non-existent existence of the black hole as your starting point.
Considerations
- The number of young people taking GCSEs in science subjects is falling.
- Part of the Science Museum’s role is to help turn young people on to science. They do this by encouraging them to ask questions, to think for themselves, and to see their world differently.
- Younger children love science. How can you encourage this particular target audience to continue to see science as something exciting and relevant?
Target Audience
8-14-year-olds.
Background
BBC News headlines on 23rd June 2008 reported that risk assessments had been carried out to establish the chances of black holes being created deep underground on the Swiss-French border when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on.
It was thought unlikely that black holes would develop. And if small black holes were created, the risk of them growing and causing a major threat to the world, was considered to pose no conceivable danger...
Let’s be clear, black holes are still just a theory about something that might not be there, that might help prove how the Universe got here. They’ve been imagined by scientists as a way to explain current thinking around the Big Bang.
So how do you risk assess the end of the world caused by a theory of something you don’t know is there? Aside for the mind-warping details, and the end-of-the-world headlines, the LHC story has triggered a huge amount of public interest.
Bright, rebellious teenagers are empathising with this curious new take on the ‘dark side’; commuters are swotting up on particle physics courtesy of the free papers; comedians are cracking jokes about the Higgs Boson on prime time TV... People are beginning to see science for what it can be – a thrilling, creative, mind-bendingly imaginative way of looking at their world differently.
Great news for science and the Science Museum.
Further information
www.sciencemuseum.org.uk
www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/bigbang
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes
public.web.cern.ch/public
dandad.org/studentawards09
Deliverables
Work mounted on to a maximum of 4 A2 or 4 A3 Boards and/or digital work to be submitted in accordance with the Technical Specifications PDF. You must also upload a digital copy of all work entered.
Brief set by
Tim Molloy, Science Museum
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