You can fill in your own profile (go to ‘my profile’). One of the questions is ‘my science words’. You need to type in all the words that ‘science’ makes you think of. Later on we’ll get you to look at that list again and see if you want to add any words or take any away.

We think that you’ll learn things from taking part in I’m a Scientist, and we believe that thinking about what you’ve learned and how your ideas have changed can be useful. But I’m a Scientist is not like normal lessons where there is a set thing you are supposed to learn.

In I’m a Scientist you have much more freedom to find out what you want to. Don’t tell your teacher we’re telling you this, but there’s lots of evidence that you learn much more if you are allowed to play and follow what you are interested in. Unfortunately the people who write the curriculum don’t seem to have noticed this. But never mind. We’re doing our best to sneak some play into your lessons anyway.

When you come back to your list of words at the end of the event, you’ll probably find that there are some new words you want to add. You might also find that you want to take away some of the words from before. Thinking about what words you are changing will be a good way for you to see how your ideas have changed from taking part.

It may sound very simple but it’s not just silly. This exercise is actually based on a technique used by social scientists called ‘personal meaning mapping’. But we think there’s no need to use fancy words to say something that’s really pretty straightforward. Sometimes people do that just to make themselves sound clever. But we really are clever so we don’t need to big it up. And we’re also very modest of course…