Science inspired at Dolní Loučky primary school and kindergarten

Our school has been involved in the project since the spring of 2019. In May, I took part in a study visit, which took place in VIDA! Science centre Brno.
We tried the exhibition game Smarter than Holmes, we saw two science shows – Detonator and Mr. Ear, we participated in selected educational programs in the roles of students, I chose the Plasma program. The whole visit was interspersed with the creation of popularization videos.

The second study visit I attended took place in Greece, at the Noesis Science Center and Technology Museum in Tessaloniki (Thessaloniki). Here, we saw the exhibition as well, got acquainted with programmable drones, tried to work with simple electric circuits and watched some science shows or 3D movies. Again, we focused on creating a popularization video.

From September 2019, the next phase of the project began. During it, a working group of VIDA edutainers and teachers has created 3 new games that use the exhibits in the exhibition. They created Bingo!, Stories of Exhibits and Restart, all for pupils in the 7-9th grades. During the autumn of 2019, our school did the introductory piloting of the Stories of Exhibits program with the 9th grade students. Everything took place in the form of a project with great success for both students and members of the project working group.
Unfortunately, in the autumn of 2020, the epidemiological situation did not allow us to visit VIDA!, when we had to try new games with the pupils of the 7th – 9th grade.

On the other hand, in the spring of 2021 we managed to invite VIDA! edutainers for online classes in 6th and 8th grade. Pupils first received a packages with material for 11 experiments and small gifts.
In the lesson, pupils were able to try some experiments according to the advice of the edutainers. The event was a great success in both classes and the students expressed a desire to repeat it in the future. Many of them also took the opportunity to shoot a short video with material from packages and then send it to Vida! as a part of video competition.

The success of the whole event is also evidenced by a short survey in which children evaluated the event. In the 8th grade, the demonstrated experiments were evaluated 4.58 out of 5 points, only 3 pupils did not perform experiments at the same time as the edutainers, and the average mark for the whole lesson was 1.42. In their answers to the question “Do you want to add anything else?”, The students wrote, for example, “it was perfect, I had fun :)” or “Probably not, but I really liked the lesson. Everything was beautifully explained. I will definitely try to send a video directly to Vida :). “