As a professor of Museums studies in a Master in Science Communication (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), I always present to my students Decide as a powerful instrument museums can use for offering to the public a new kind of events.

In the academic year 2007-2008 I have proposed to my students the organization of a stand dedicated to debates in the framework of FEST, the International Fair of Scientific Publishing that took place in Trieste for four days in the spring 2008. Eight Master students accepted to participate, and were trained. As the theoretical background had been already presented during the master course, the four days of training were dedicated to experiment different kind of discussion games, including Decide.

Then we prepared for FEST a programme that included all Decide kits, and some other discussion-games inspired by the Citizenscience project (www.at-bristol.co.uk/cz).
The students translated of revised the Italian translation, and updated all Decide kits, adding some facts and problems cards, in order to be closer to the actual Italian situation and to present last news in the field. We decided also to produce a leaflet with further information, one for all seven Decide topics, so that the people, after playing, could, when back home, learn and think more about the topics. In the leaflet we added more facts, and suggested books (also novels and science fiction books), documentaries and films (also science fictions films), websites, etc…

The programme was called “Science dialogues” (“Dialoghi di scienza”) - the mornings were dedicated to secondary school classes, and were advertised with the other offers dedicated to schools, the afternoons were dedicated to general public. The pupils (from 15 years-old to 18 years-old) had no problem at all to understand and play the game. On the contrary, they were very much more quicker then adults, sometimes we could say too quick: instead of reading carefully the cards, they expressed directly their opinion. The risk of being superficial, or to express stereotypes under the “guidance” of the group leaders, exists; for that reason the final discussion is very important.

Everybody participated and enjoyed the game a lot. The teachers were absolutely enthusiastic. Two of them declared that the game can be used for talking about science and technology, but also in order to make pupils discuss in a foreign language, do to the existing and open source translations. We had a good experience also with adults. Who came, spent a lot of time (around two hours and more) using Decide and the other discussion games proposed, sometimes staying more for discussing with the facilitators after the end of the games. For the Master students, it was a most effective way to understand what "the dialogue between science and society" means. Fabio Meliciani, one of the Master student who worked as facilitator during FEST, wrote in the final report:

“When ‘to dialogue’ means ‘to understand’: understand what we don’t know and how we can get to know, understand how much we need to know, understand that it is no important to know everything for expressing our point of view, understand that we can enjoy discussing science, that we can talk with people we met for the first time, feeling as they were class companions, or friends, with whom: ‘if we don’t’ speak with them with whom I should speak?’. Understand that everybody has something to say, and it is important to listen; understand that at the end we have to decide, and we can also step back for everybody’s interests. It is not a small thing, if all that is ‘to dialogue’”.

Paola Rodari
SISSA Medialab, Trieste, Italy

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