Abstract:

High school students ("budding" biologists) and three generations of biologists (researchers, high school teachers, graduate students and undergraduates in Life Sciences) have teamed up to propose and involve the public of all age groups (including younger) in interesting activities deriving from their school-work experience at the Department of Biology of the Federico II University of Naples, Italy.

Passion, competence, creativity and determination have supported the success of their communication activity on the RI-GENERATION theme also documented by the results of satisfaction tests designed and prepared for this purpose and administered to visitors of all age at the end of the visit at the stand of XXXII Edition of FUTURO REMOTO last November.

Different activities, designed for visitors of all age groups, have been proposed during the scientific event. All seasoned with simple experiments and serious games to discover and have fun with the numbers and themes of molecular and/or cellular biology.

High school students, as promoters of science dissemination, were equipped with paper, pencil, ruler and...fantasy to build 3D DNA origami also customized.

University undergraduates, conceiving and creating posters, models of cells and viruses purposely constructed with "poor" and/or recycled materials, have allowed visitors to discover "the numbers" and the functions of the generations and re-generation of cells while they are kept under a microscope.

A strategy to increase public interest in biology was to design serious games and make "live games" by interpreting and implementing the theme re-generations of the XXXII edition of FUTURO REMOTO.

In particular, "live games" were prepared almost seven weeks before generating plants from seeds and pictures of animals from egg cells.

A further playful activity, which was very successful, was one in which visitors had to "connect" images of larvae to their respective adult insect and crosswords, memory games and some simple experiments in line with the RI-GENERATION theme.

Dissemination activities integrated with those carried out in the molecular biology laboratory (wet-lab) and also in Bioinformatics (in silico lab) have constituted and will constitute the thesis project of three-year degree in Biological Sciences of some team members (http://www.dipartimentodibiologia.unina.it/progetto-docendo-discimus).

For the continuity of the scientific-educational project, in order to encourage talented students, I selected four of the 16 members of the Docendo discimus group from those who did well in the previous edition of Futuro Remoto. I trained them for leadership roles and entrusted each of the undergraduate students to the new team.

This experience added a contribute to a growing body of research by analyzing how students engage in conversation and work together to solve problems in a peer-led small-group setting.

Keywords:

Stem cells, SCIENCE Communication, By teaching we Learn, Docendo Discimus, peer-led team learning.