Since 1825, December has been the month for The Royal Institution of Great Britain’s “Christmas Lectures for Young People”, established by Michael Faraday, who presented 19 of the early lectures himself. According to the RI, the lectures “serve as a forum for presenting complex scientific issues to children in an informative and entertaining manner, and are particularly well-known for students’ participation in demonstrations and experiments”. Since 1966, the lectures have been on television thanks to the BBC, and many are available free online; registration, which is free, is required and highly recommended.
Some notable lectures and lecturers: in 1964, Desmond Morris on “Animal behaviour”; in 1973, David Attenborough on “The language of animals”; in 1977, Carl Sagan on “Planets”; in 1991, Richard Dawkins on “Growing Up in the World” (which is also free online here).
This year’s lecture is “The 300 million years war” presented on Saturday, December 5th by Prof. Sue Hartley:
Plants might seem passive, defenceless and almost helpless. But they are most definitely not! Thanks to a war with animals that’s lasted over 300 million years, they’ve developed many terrifying and devious ways to defend themselves and attack their enemies. Vicious poisons, lethal materials and even cunning forms of communicating with unlikely allies are just some of the weapons in their armoury. Using these and other tactics, plants have seen off everything from dinosaurs to caterpillars.
You can watch a number of Royal Institution lectures for Children at the RI’s web archives.
Also available online at the RI website: games (What’s Inside an Element?, The Science of the Elements Quiz, Build Your Own Skeleton, and more) and pages of educational resources for teachers and others.
Filed under: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Childhood, Christmas, Earth science, Education, Engineering, Evolution, Holidays, Ideas, Natural History, Physics, Public Speaking, Science |
Farm School, Farm House 
Hey Becky! Started to write a post about this on Home Physics but couldn’t get any of the webcasts to work. If there’s something I’m missing let me know.
Finally did some actual physics experiments today — a little late in the school year but oh well. Will post soon.
Also, if you’re in NYC on 12/19, I’ll be spending the morning at the Silk Road exhibit at the AMNH, and the afternoon at the Wired store on West 13th meeting some of the GeekDads in the flesh for the first time. You should try to come by!
Hey, girl! Stopping by to say hello & that I’ve been thinking of you. Not on my regular computer these days (waiting on repair), so I don’t have your email address w/ me right now.
Anyway, hi, hello, and sending good wishes & thoughts to you & yours in NYC.
I used to go to these lectures as a kid and can definitely recommend them! My kids are still a little too small to get much from them but there’s enough interesting and well presented stuff to mean that my husband and I tune in each year!
Thank you so much for posting this. I have a mac as my main computer but will pull out the old laptop especially for the lectures. Hard to get to things over here sometimes so this is a great find, will share with my little classical coop group.
Alicia in New Zealand