Imagine a learning experience that not only engages students in solving puzzles, but also empowers their curiosity about Big Questions and cultivates exhilarating “aha moments” where new insights about knowledge click into place.

This page introduces ‘Eureka’ a project we are proposing that will support schools, clubs, families and science centres with resources and templates to design their own ‘Eureka’ Big Questions Day – or unit – or whole-school curriculum.

We hope the videos and examples you see on this page prompt you to want to know more. We will add more details to this page over the coming weeks – please come back again!

WELCOME TO EUREKA!

Our example of a Eureka day of Big Questions begins with a workshop on Virtual Reality where students are transported into space to experience the Space Station – or underwater to explore the depths of the ocean or into an imaginary futuristic city.

A Eureka Big Questions day begins with a VR experience followed by a session that explains the theme for the day.
Image produced with GenAI

This sets the scene for our Big Question for today: now that we live in a world where technology can give you the experience of being in space – just by putting on a headset …

How do we know what’s real?

Image produced with GenAI.
Teachers’ note: VR goggles are available to borrow if you are running a Big Questions Day in school.

Session 2: “Welcome to our University”

In our sample Big Questions day, Session 2 took place in one of our small lecture theatres. The 24 students and their teachers who joined us for the day were from three schools. Berry welcomed them to the university and explained that “Today we are scholars – we are all scholars – and we are here together to address some Big Questions….”

Part way through the welcome, Berry asks – is my speech authentically me, or written by an AI? To find out how students responded, please watch the video further up the page. It includes interviews with two students who are both in Year 9 (age 13-14).

Session 3: How do we explain this ‘photograph’ – and can we tell if it’s real?

Students move into break-out groups of 6-10, to discuss their ideas with a teacher. Formative assessment questions guide the teacher to tailor their support. A summative question at the end of the workshop checks whether students have gained epistemic insight into how GenAI works.

Teaching point: This AI generated image was created by prompting a GenAI application with the words, “water droplet on a leaf”. The image mirrors back to us how we ‘see’ a water droplet that we think is worthy of notice. Technically it is a prediction generated from a bricolage of a vast number of digital images that have labels similar to this. Talking point: how does this image compare with a photo you might take yourself of a ‘water droplet on a leaf’? Formative assessment: listen out for explanations that photographs we take of nature are ‘in the moment’ and special to us, whereas a GenAI image combines images to create a generalised view – but both are created using technology! When you look at a photograph you’ve taken – do you know if the droplet and leaf are still there?

Encourage students to think about how they could prompt an image generator to create a droplet on a particular species of leaf or at a particular time of day. Conclude the discussion by suggesting that technologies such as GenAI and a camera muddy our understanding and definitions of how we know and say what is real. In a world of mixed realities there are different ways to interpret and understand what we mean by ‘real’.

Session 4: the Interactive ‘EI Discipline Wheel’

The EI Discipline Wheel is available to schools at any time – and this workshop could take place in school in a Big Questions Day or in a week or term of EI activities. For our pilot event, students and their teachers came into the workshop with no prior knowledge or experiences with this tool. Our research aim was to discover whether it successfully engaged students’ epistemic curiosity and encouraged ‘agentic learning’.

Students explore the Discipline Wheel

Epistemic insight Research Question: Can playing with the Discipline Wheel cultivate a deeper understanding of the natures of different disciplines and enrich students’ epistemic knowledge with examples of why it can be helpful to bring disciplines together?

Activity 5: the Eureka Escape Room

The Eureka Escape Room was the finale of our day. Before students were transported there, the room and its puzzles were co-created and arranged by teachers, researchers and University Ambassadors. For our sample event, the puzzles were co-created by Astronomy PhD students, a history tutor and a researcher in education.

Please watch the video to see what we set up and how students responded.

Eureka Escape Room

Summary and Overview

Picture the scene: A student holds up a smart phone and switches on the camera. A doorway ‘magically’ appears in the middle of their classroom.

“Welcome to the Eureka Escape Room”, explains the phone. “You can only escape through the doorway if you can first solve two puzzles. The materials and equipment are on tables around the room.” And the doorway disappears.

‘Eureka’ is a mixed reality learning game – designed to ignite students’ curiosity about the world’s most profound questions: “How do we know what’s real?” “Is the universe created? “What’s the future of humanity now that we have AI?”.

At home and in school, students have access to interactive tools like the ‘Discipline Wheel’, to boost their epistemic agency, creativity and epistemic insight as they explore the bridges and boundaries between different ways to answer. Teachers choose the format and the answer options available –which disciplines, age-groups, and Big Questions.

Before the games begin, University Ambassadors are available to share their local knowledge and expertise in Astronomy, AI, Theology and Ecology. Pushing the boundaries of co-creation, they collaborate with parents and teachers to co-design a day of Big Questions and hands-on puzzles for an escape room. The Eureka escape room works with or without technological wizardry because students will love to find case studies and instructions that incorporate local ecologies, languages and cultural references.

What happens next?

Students are each given a ‘Eureka Puzzle Box’ to take home.

A QR code on the back of the box opens an online launch window for the EI Think Tank. This interactive is designed to cultivate the epistemic insight that a polarised debate between two apparently oppositional points of view may be more to do with how the question is framed, and the willingness of each party to explore the question in the round.

The EI Think Tank

The Think Tank only ‘works’ once there are four different disciplinary perspectives at the table and the ‘arc’ of the conversation is fixed and can’t be changed.

This tool and the EI Discipline Wheel draw on responses created with GenAI but the versions made available to students are working from a suite of saved GenAI responses that their teacher/parent/club leader has reviewed.

In our example, a student has selected four disciplines to explore the Big Question, “Is the Universe Created”.

The box also contains a pipette and an invitation to take a photograph of a water droplet on a leaf and submit it for the school’s digital gallery.

Big Questions about Astronomy and Artificial Intelligence for University Ambassadors

The wider Eureka project includes a companion project that targets Astronomy PhD students who become university ambassadors for Eureka activities in schools