Knowledge for Life

All this week we're workshopping ideas for the Darwin Project with young people from Islington.  Here's workshop Participant Hayley Thomas's take on the process so far:

Well, I must say this Darwin project has really enlightened my knowledge and attitude to Darwin’s theory of Evolution for sure!

I mean, its sooo exciting to find out how different beliefs can be stemmed from one man’s theory and other beliefs that challenge the theory also..

Before I start babbling on, I’ll just give u a brief...ish summary of what we've done in the past three days... which is like four billion years on the time line we made which starts from us being soup, to , eventually humans ... at the moment we’ve become multi celled organisms ... OH YEAH!!

Monday we looked closely at Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and this was explained by a real (yes real) Scientist called Dale (rocks!) and we introduced ourselves as well as our beliefs by having a discussion, where we were given statements and a scale of one to ten labelled on the floor. According to the statements given, we then had to move to the number, we though best made this statement true to ourselves and we got to discuss why- evolution was dropped in there as well folks, oh yeah..

Tuesday we looked more at developing the play we were going to produce with the help of profesh actors namely : Suzie, Okorie and Project Co-ordinator Maryam.

We then got into groups and were given various real statements from opponents of Darwin’s theory. We then partook in further discussion. We also did sketches of a brief summary of evolution, which helped us understand it more, well me n e ways... lol

After all that niceness, we started looking at possible plots for the story we were going to produce, who our two professional actors were going to perform to yr 10 science classes, with OUR names under 'EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS' .. doesn’t really get any better than that, really ... no ...

Wednesday, we actually were given the chance to see a bit of the play Ali, (badman writer,in a very good way lol) had put together, which was really good! and we had to come up with possibly what the ending could be.. we were also given a red orange or green light on our ideas and tomorrow... who knowssss!!?

So far it has been amazing and I’m ecstatic I chose to come because I have taken from it, knowledge that I can apply to my life and a few really cool friends, which may I add, includes 2 professional actors 2 scientists and a writer and other mini geniuses..um ..CAN MY SUMMER HOLIDAY GET ANY BETTER?!!

Hayley x