Space presentation to young audiences

[zeithief]

Hi, I'm a junior college student. I will be doing a small and brief presentation on the origin of universe, its evolution and the ultimate fate of it. As the target audience is upper primary school and lower secondary students (11-14 yo), i will not be going into too technical stuff. Just want to ask how should i structured my presentation and what should i particularly cover so that my presentation is clear, comprehensible and interesting to the young audience. Any one can suggest however comments from people who have done such presentation to young audiences are particularly welcomed :D

zeithief

 

[CPL.Luke]

well the more demonstrations the better, I would suggest talking a little about special and general relativity using deomstrations lie the ball on a rubber sheet and such.

Try to focus your explanations on the analogies that you find in any physics popularization.

and also remember that people that age have low attention spans, if you where a white lab coat or do something elsequally quirky you'll probably be able to keep their attention for longer.

 

[physics girl phd]

the more demonstrations the better... and also remember that people that age have low attention spans...

hands on... good also. Can anyone think of a hands-on way to represent the big bang?

I'd look here.. Astronomy Education Review (new on-line peer-reviewed journal, unfortunately not really searchable yet):
http://aer.noao.edu/cgi-bin/backissues.pl
In particular, one article has references on astronomy for the blind... that might have hands on. (This is one of my research areas... physics for disabled populations)

Sorry I can't offer more.. while I taught younger levels, astrophys is not really my area, I'm a "materials girl," and I'd need more time to become clever about specifics to your project so I defer to others.

 

[J77]

How long will the presentation be, time-wise?