Your ILW2013 in Just 3 Words: Slideshow

Highlights of ILW2013: Slideshow

Team Puzzle Challenge – Madeleine Ash

As I stepped into Appleton Tower to participate in ‘Team Puzzle Challenge’ a flicker of trepidation washed over me. The thought of attempting maths is one of those things in life that induces a great sense of uneasiness in a vast swathe of the population; so the thought of spending two hours attempting to tackle an event run by a university maths department, and led by PhD students, was a little intimidating – was my GCSE going to cut it?

BBC Radio 4 Quiz Show – Rebecca Pfister

Photo by Juliette Behr

On Friday evening staff, students and members of the public took part as the audience of the BBC Show the 3^rd degree – supporting their friends and colleagues who were testing their knowledge and competed in an exciting episode of the popular show.

Fix a Film Screening – Michael Hannan

Photo by Ruoyi Wang.

Given Hollywood’s less-than-sterling reputation for accuracy in its films, it’s pretty much a given that in no genre is this tendency more pronounced than science fiction, where finicky little facts about physics and chemistry would be hard enough for even an intelligent, patient, gifted storyteller to get right, much less somebody working for Twentieth Century Fox. It’s also not a stretch to imagine that this lack of attention to detail probably drives technologically-minded types crazy. Yelling ‘that’s not how science works!’, throwing-their-microscopes-at-the-screen kind of crazy. Hence Fix a Film Day, a competition run by the Non Fiction Science Society (NonFiSci) on Wednesday 20^th February, where Edinburgh University students were invited to get into teams and make videos which ‘corrected’ the faulty science of classic science fiction movies. The winning entry, presented as part of the Informatics Closing Ceremony for Innovative Learning Week, took on the faulty science of Ghostbusters by presenting certain ‘outtakes’ from the movie itself, with the Ghostbusters being played by the students themselves (Hannah, Eleanor and Athirah.)

Rock Music, Politics and Society in the long 1960s – Madeleine Ash

When Innovative Learning Week began in 2012 I remember one of my tutors, semi-jokingly, commenting that having a particular week dedicated to this was a little offensive – it implied that what the tutors did the rest of the year was not ‘innovative’. Well, this seminar on ‘Rock Music, Politics and Society in the long 1960s’ was almost identical in structure to any seminar I’ve experienced in the History, Classics and Anthropology department at any other time of the year; except it lasted an hour longer. So aside from failing the ‘innovative’ criteria, what was the event like?

David Hume Cup – Rebecca Pfister

The participants Gilles-frederic Fivaz (Left), William McCoy (Middle), Philip Puffy (Right). Photo by: Chen ZONG

On Friday three David Hume cup contestants gathered in the David Hume tower to debate the Independence of Scotland organised by the University of Edinburgh’s Economics Society and sponsored by Bloomberg.

Gilles-Frederick, Phillip and William – economics students at the University, and as noted by one of the judging panel member and Head of Economics Dr Simon Clarke, all possessing the names of strong English kings, entered the debate well prepared and ready to argue and prove their knowledge.