European Museums’ Night 2024: understanding radiometric dating through a scavenger hunt inside the MUST (Museo Universitario di Scienze della Terra, Sapienza)

Hands-on activities are experiential learning opportunities that allow students to engage with a topic through direct interaction. These “learning by doing” activities achieve, through the active involvement of the participants, an improved understanding and a long term retention of the studied topics. Hands-on activities allow to see, touch, manipulate, hear and even smell or taste aspects of the learning material, in a process that caters to the needs of students with different learning styles. When involving collaboration and teamwork, hands-on activities are also powerful tools to improve students’ soft skills. Such tools, if introduced in dissemination and outreach activities, can have an effective impact in enhancing the understanding of difficult topics (e.g. the concept of deep time) by the general public. For this reason, during the European night of Museums 2024, at the Sapienza University Museum of Earth Sciences in Rome (MUST), children and young adults were offered the opportunity to join a scavenger hunt and to date their geological find. This activity used recycled materials such as bottle caps and paper clips to build specimens that explain the basic concepts of radioactive decay and half-life. The participants witnessed radioactive decay “in real time” by manipulating the specimens and watching the caps “decaying” into paperclips and then proceeded to the radiometric dating of their own sample based on its caps to paper clips ratio.