Ig Nobel prizes
The Ig Nobel prize ceremonies have now been running since 1991, and are in their 34th year. The idea behind them is stated succinctly in their website -
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
The organisation collects suggestions of scientific research published in reputable journals, which sound weird, or unusual or downright funny, and then awards prizes for the most eccentric. The prizes are awarded at a live ceremony, held this year at MIT in the States - a ceremony which lightly parodies the real Nobel Prize ceremonies, but also with a great deal of humour (throwing paper aeroplanes a speciality). Anyway, you can explore much more about the institution by looking at the Improbable Research website.
This material is intended to explore several different areas.
Human ingenuity in science ... the research projects have been chosen because they sound absurd when first described - "why would anyone think of researching something like that ??" However, when described in more detail, it emerges that there are serious purposes behind the research, and the apparent weirdness is simply the result of creative thinking, aiming to explore beyond the normal conventional limits of scientific knowledge. Human ingenuity in science involves thinking outside the box.
Anglophone humour ... a strong and typical feature of the anglophone sense of humour is 'debunking' - to find laughter in satirical parody of subjects normally taken very seriously, even pompously. In this case, the target for parody, clearly, is the Nobel Prize institution, usually seen as the peak of scientific honour. In imitating something of the Nobel system, the organisers wish to entertain, while at the same time exploring the efforts of ordinary scientists.
The News Report ... I have edited the original article, so this is perhaps not quite 'authentic'. However, it may be worthwhile pointing out to the students certain key and common features of a News Report:
- Headline - summarising the main idea (and, in this case, arousing the reader's curiosity!)
- Sub-headline - amplifying the subject
- Author + date
- Concise explanation of key story - ll.1-6
- Context - explaining the Ig Nobel system - ll.7-10
- Fuller explanation of the subject - ll.11-25
Handout
Ig Nobel text + exercise The text
This consists of an extract from a News Report of the 2024 ceremony - and you can see the full report here.
Ask the students to read the text. It is fairly accessible, but you may need to clarify some items of vocabulary.
Then discuss whether they think that scientific research like this is worthwhile, and if so, why.
The exercise
The second sheet of the handout includes other Ig Nobel prize-winners. There is a short summary of each, and students are asked to think out what serious scientific point there might have been behind this wacky research. It might be most productive to do this thinking out in small groups, pooling students' scientific knowledge and understanding.
Finally, ask for reports on what ideas have been produced, and speculate about which might be most interesting and credible.
Further exploration
You could ask the students, in small groups, to access the Improbable Research website (the organisation which runs the Ig Nobel Prizes).
Ask them to skim through the various lists of prize winners, and select a few (say, 3 or 4) which seem to them interesting - whether weird or intriguing or stimulating.
In their groups, they should then prepare short presentations, explaining to the rest of the group what the research project is, and why they find it interesting.
These presentations can be just normal ones, or you could try the 24/7 system described below.
The 24/7 system
The winner of each prize is required to give a short explanation of the science behind their research project. This is to be done in two formats: a concise explanation in 24 seconds; and a single sentence of 7 words.
Here is an example:
Hydrodynamics
Lecturer: Erica Johnson (Hydrodynamicist and Research Associate at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
In 24 Seconds: “Hydrodynamics is the study of liquids in motion. Its foundational axioms include the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, which state that in a closed fluidic system, the aforementioned quantities must remain constant over time. Under certain fluidic conditions, the governing equations can reduce to a number of well-known equations, such as the Euler, the Bernoulli, and the Navier-Stokes equations. When taken together they describe, for example, how fluids move in rivers, pipes, and around airplane wings.” [Time called by Referee]
In 7 Words: “Liquids flow in response to natural forces”
[Actual Number of Words Used: 7]
.If controlling timing is difficult or inconvenient, you could possibly require them to make the statement in a fixed number of words (perhaps 50?). Anyway, the purpose must be to give students practice in expressing themselves concisely, but clearly and precisely - and writing a short presentation collectively, in their groups, should be a productive exercise.