The White Rabbit
Lewis Carroll’s interest in mathematics, science, games and puzzles are on display in the books he wrote. The ideas below are based around them.
Beware: they are all ‘rabbit holes’ , which could lead to a life-time’s obsession if you are not carefully monitored.
Crucially, these topics are all living things, morphing and mutating daily, which will keep the presenters and visitors lively at all times.
Please help it grow – feed it with ideas!
Richard Robinson Richard@BrightonScience.com – 07974 572 990
Alice in FUNderland
King of Hearts
TELLING THE STORY
The Trial scene at the end of Alice in Wonderland contains the most wonderfully confused speech, as the White Rabbit tries to explain the simplest thing to the jury, but makes less sense than Jabberwocky.
And actually, children, people in general, and scientists in particular, often have difficulty explaining simple things. (Children sometimes don’t know how to start; scientists often don’t know when to stop!)
We will study stories, which should famously “begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, then stop”, using Story Dice or Story Cards, and build narratives that work: the first steps to creativity.
Images and stories can be created collectively (using the picture consequences and the collaborative story games).
Alice
GAMES WITH LANGUAGE
Our language is daft (think about ‘though’, ‘through’, ‘thought’, ‘thorough’, etc, in which ‘ough’ looks the same but sounds different)
It is highly ‘redundant’, that is, there are a lot of spare letters in every word. This is good: it means it can be recognized even if it is badly written, or in the dark, or misspelt. which is useful (cf Mark Twain’s “Improvements”)
Sentences actually don’t even need vowels (we can play the game of NVWLS {no vowels}) but in such a case, one letter out of place can be fatal,
And that’s why badly written email addresses are a problem.
… and why Michelangelo’s Moses has horns (we tell the story)
Jabberwocky
NONSENSE
Can you make sense of Jabberwocky? Clearly we can! Everybody understands what happens in it. It turns out there can be quite a lot of sense in nonsense! Contrariwise, many attempts by scientists to explain simple scientific facts end up sounding like nonsense!
Humpty Dumpty
RIDDLES
Humpty Dumpty IS a riddle (the answer to his nursery rhyme is: ‘it’s an egg’)
Visitors sort through a variety of Victorian riddles, trying to match them with their answers.
Puntastic is a game to find Christmas Cracker jokes (‘What do you get if you cross a hen with a bedside clock? An alarm cluck!’ etc)
The Duchess
PARADOX
“Speak roughly to your little child, and beat him when he sneezes. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases”… is an example of paradoxical behaviour. There are many more.
Caterpillar
SIZE and LOOKING GLASSES
The Shrinking Box can make you tiny.
A mirror shrinks you to exactly half size, no matter how far away you are.
… and makes you left-handed.
Right-handed people are ‘dextrous’ (in Latin); left-handed are ‘sinister’ …why?
The lens in your eye turns you upside-down and inside out (but are you still left-handed?)
Upside-down goggles challenge you to draw umop-episdn (that’s ‘upside-down’ typed upside down).
Size constancy demonstrations (“This cow is small…”) … will teach you the illusions of every-day life, and how to ‘think outside the box’ (real box provided free)
Red Queen
TIME
We have an excellent internal clock, but we seldom use it. Time perception is dodgy
Murphy’s Laws of time (eg ‘How long is a minute? That depends which side of the toilet door you are on’)
Change blindness: We cannot see fast things (prestidigitation here), or slow things (Climate Change here).
Past and present mix up – present experiences affect your memories.
Déjà vu, anyone?
Can time go backwards? (I have invented a time reversing machine)
White Queen
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST
Quite literally, a demonstration of 6 genuine, curriculum based, phenomenal, impossible things which occur while you are still innocently eating your cereal.
(For instance, milk can be made to flow sideways)
White Knight
MINDFUL MAGIC
These are simple science-based magic tricks that kids (or parents) can learn, plus an explanation of the science behind them which roots the ‘magic’ in the real world.
Also, there are many things in nature which seem magical. We study some of them. (For instance, as in The Walrus and The Carpenter, it is possible to have the Sun and the Moon in the sky at the same time – just about every day actually)
Lewis Carroll
SIMPLE GAMES
Back in the day, before TV and its children, there were simple games, with simple bits of paper and pencils. Lewis Carroll invented some of them. Here we play some from all around that era.
Simple games of chess; like using just pawns, etc, and including suicide chess
Plus Word games, picture creation games, etc…
FORMAT
All the activities will benefit from focused attention for 10-15 minutes, so the most comfortable format would be sitting at a fair-sized café table as one might for a game of whist. This puts the kids on an equal footing to the parents.
We want to encourage lively conversation, rather than any lecturing.
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