Embodying randomness in nature through theatre – teaching evolution to kids at Science is Wonderful! 2025
Science is Wonderful! is an annual outreach event organized by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Each year, a small selection of ERC laureates are included and this year it was Utrecht ľϸӰ’s team working on the ERC Starting Grant project MindTheGap, awarded to Emilia Jarochowska (Department of Earth Sciences). At the Africa Museum in Brussels, scientists set up the wildest experiments and shows to invite visitors to be a scientist for a day. Although Science is Wonderful! is open to everyone, its heart are schoolchildren.
The MindTheGap team had the ambition of conveying the core of their research without “dumbing down”. But how does one explain computer simulations of evolution to 10-year-olds? The scientists gave the audience the task of doing a computer’s work by letting the kids roll foam dice to generate random numbers that determined how the animals on stage evolved. “This was a daring scenario, as we couldn’t predict in which way the simulation would go – just as in our models. The actors had to be prepared for different outcomes of the play”, says Emilia Jarochowska.
Perfect protagonists
The next challenge was to find an evolutionary change that could be represented on stage and truthful to the fossil record. The perfect protagonists turned out to be trilobites: charismatic, extinct arthropods, which changed their segment numbers during evolution. Trilobites were played with great talent by the postdoctoral researcher Xianyi Liu and MSc student Sidney Bickerton. The simulation culminated in trilobites evolving into a large and clumsy one and a small and agile one.
Attack
Once the variability had been created, the differences between the trilobites were subject to natural selection through an attack by Anomalocaris – a magnificent top predator from the earliest times of life’s history, played by the PhD student Niklas Hohmann. Thanks to a collaboration with a Rotterdam-based textile artist, Claire Zandvliet, the audience was mesmerized with fossil costumes. One boy was so upset at the predator attacking the less fit trilobite that it ran after Anomalocaris to slap it.
Diversity
Evolution is nuanced: the team’s goal was to convey that there’s more to it than the old adage of the survival of the fittest; selection can only take place in the presence of (bio)diversity and, like in a game of chess, once we understand the processes and probabilities governing random changes, we can predict possible outcomes.
Models
Beside of the show, UU researchers engaged the visitors into interactive activities, such as creating a haptic model of the fossil record using tectonic analogue models from the research group of Ernst Willingshofer at Utrecht ľϸӰ’s Earth Simulation Laboratory and reconstructing the diet and evolutionary tree of animals based on their skulls. Especially the skull of a hippo was admired by everyone alike, from schoolchildren to Ekaterina Zaharieva, the European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation.
Host the show yourself
Science is Wonderful! demonstrates that it is possible to explain research-focused, complex scientific topics to children of all ages and cultural backgrounds – be it in French, Dutch, English, Polish, or German. If you are interested in hosting the show, please contact the MindTheGap team through Emilia Jarochowska (e.b.jarochowska@uu.nl).