jaimeastorga2000 comments on Outreach opportunity - Less Wrong

11 Post author: RichardKennaway 12 November 2010 11:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (20)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 November 2010 04:14:21PM *  5 points [-]

If I recall correctly, mine seemed to like watching Walter Lewin's MIT video lectures, Bill Nye the Science Guy episodes, a bunch of recent Blockbusters on DVD, and Jeff Dunham's act.

More seriously, one thing I remember that that got student's attention in high school pretty quickly was cool and/or surprising experimental results shown to them. My chemistry teacher got everybody excited by performing a precipitation reaction for us, because seeing liquids combine and result in some dust forming and falling down to the bottom of the beaker with our own eyes was awesome. When watching Lewin's videos, nothing got more praise than his dramatic demonstration of the conservation of mechanical energy (the drama was important; my physics professor in university did the same thing, but didn't get nearly as much of a reaction because he didn't play it up like it could be his last lecture, despite doing the demonstration live). And people in my psychology class were very fond of both the selective attention test / awareness test videos and a practical demonstration of the sunk cost fallacy (he had 4 of us bid on a dollar bill with the highest 2 results paying but only the highest result getting the dollar; needless to say, both top bidders ended up losing money).