Words without Experience Are Meaningless, and We only Understand what We Can Do: High-Tech-Instruments and Multimedia Journals in the Science Classroom

Abstract«Words without experience are meaningless», and «you only understand what you can do yourself». These two quotes from Vladimir Nabokov and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe summarize in brief the idea of our «Berzelius project». It is an interdisciplinary science education approach offering a borrowable high-tech instrument park with theme-oriented interdisciplinary multimedia laboratory journals (MLJs). A team of highly skilled science educators elaborates these MLJs using high-class videos, graphics and audios to get students hands on the instruments and to improve their technological, data, multimedia and science literacy. The situation: People talk about PCR without knowing how to write polymerase chain reaction, and people deny anthropogenic climate change without even knowing the difference between climate and weather. The same applies to artificial intelligence (AI) and digitality. Everybody has an opinion about anything. With Donald Trump, post-truth era really got rolling. And during the pandemic at the latest, it got impossible to oversee an open anti-science attitude, spreading particularly in Western democracies. Science lost trust. For an increasing amount of people in Europe and the US, conspiration attitudes got more attractive than facts. Although reasons for this lie mainly in unprocessed anxiety as well as in an erroneous view of history associated with an overcome good-evil scheme, also science communication failed. First, science often uses a very technical language and scientists find it difficult to speak to a non-scientific audience. Then, even most educated people have a very erroneous concept of science. Apart from thinking that science is complicated, tedious and infallible, they think that scientific results are set in stone. Generally, corrections of scientific models have been occurring for a long time below public's awareness. During the pandemic, however, science had a very high visibility and contradictions have not passed unobserved. Many people got confused and some lost trust. That nothing in science is set in stone, that models don`t represent reality (they rather describe the latter), that a model is not the truth and that absolute truths are not existing is completely new to a big part of society. Do we have to rethink science education? Most of the younger people leave school without having scientific and multimedia literacy, without having a rough idea of how sciences work. According to a paper of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 70% of the UK teachers think that the UK curriculum cannot cope with the world's challenges. Secondly, science communication has to be integrated more strongly into research and teaching. Our approach: Our project bridges school science and laboratory science with high-tech instruments. The fusion of these instruments and multimedia lab journals similarly aims at fueling students' sense of wonder and excitement, demonstrating scientific concepts and theories and at developing technological, data, media and knowledge literacy. Particularly, the possibility to lean instruments for elaborating A-level exams is very solicitated. Students can also express their experimental findings in multimedia formats thus learning to communicate science. We will present our concept by demonstrating one or two small high-tech instruments with corresponding multimedia journals. Keywords: High-tech instrument park, interdisciplinary multimedia laboratory journals, experiments, natural sciences, videos, graphics, audios, science communication, post-truth area, scientific and multimedia literacy, technological literacy, data literacy