Designing a science activity for middle school children is a challenging task, especially if it aims to be interdisciplinary. One may ask if it is possible to craft a positive learning experience from different areas such as history of science, chemistry, or ethics. In this paper, we argue it can be achieved if we use the right tools to engage a young audience. A combination of gamification, hands-on activities, and storytelling techniques was successfully used, providing a unique form to approach chemistry and ethics subjects in an "edutainment" format. The result is a game that challenges participants to solve a crime, while addressing chemistry topics to gather pieces of evidence and facing science-related ethical conundrums. In our pilot study, participants evaluated this activity positively, identifying the innovation and entertaining features as the most relevant in their gaming experience.
Creating a fun, interactive, and useful science activity for teaching purposes can be a real challenge, especially if it is addressed to middle-school children. More and more science communicators are employing novel communication techniques to better reach out to their audience. In science communication, storytelling is valuable to sparking interest in science. Given that there are many episodes in the history of science that can serve as inspiration, the authors of this chapter share how they used storytelling, based on a real-life event, to create a science communication activity for middle-school children. Focused on chemistry and ethics, these topics were introduced through hands-on laboratory activities with ethical questions embedded in the story line. This task challenges the students to come up with answers by themselves, through a problem-based learning model. By adding game logic elements to this activity, the authors created a unique form of communicating science, both educational and entertaining, which children appreciated.
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