New podcast Science Bedtime Stories: a gift from scientists to kids

We live the podcast era. Even though podcasts were widespread even before the pandemic, its arrival and the associated face-to-face meetings restrictions supported online activities of all kinds. This trend also significantly affected the activities of the Science Lairs, which helped the children to meet the experts face to face until September last year. Although the classic format of the event was replaced by its online version, according to the feeling of the organizers of the Science Lairs it could not replace the “real deal”. What was typical of traditional meetings: impulsive questions of children, the atmosphere in which there is no inappropriate question, spontaneity and a certain feeling of freedom, which could not be transferred to the online world.

Therefore the organizers of the Science Lairs decided to create a new format, where again children and students will again have the main word when they ask about things that interest them, even when they are talking about scientific topics. Children are taught to listen bedtime stories before going to bed in order to move into the world of fantasy and to think about the beautiful world of princesses, knights or dragons. An attempt was made to try to show that even the real world they live in is full of miracles worthy of dreaming or thinking.

With this ambition on June 1, 2021, on International Children’s Day, Science Lairs organizers launched the children’s scientific podcast Science Bedtime Stories in which scientists answer curious questions of pupils in three primary schools. In the first part entitled “On space missions“, the pupils of the Veselá škola in Prešov were guests of the well-known Slovak space designer Ján Baláž from the Institute of Experimental Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice.

First episode of Science Bedtime Stories can be found HERE

 

Author: M. Zentková