So, there’s a Facebook group called The Lighter Side Of Science that prides itself in, predominantly, sharing memes that are lightly scientific and cool, all the while delivering a certain level of humor and relatability.
The group is actually a part of IFL Science and has roughly 741,000 members as of this listicle.
For the record, it’s not all memes. There is community engagement going on in several ways, including IFL Science promoting its own articles and folks in the community themselves asking scientific questions and everyone else jumping on board and brainiacking this thing out.
Engaging to say the least.
Now, we won’t dive into what memes are and why they are such a big deal. The tl;dr of it is it’s become a means of communication and connectivity among folks all the while they’re popular because they’re relatable.
What we haven’t yet discussed is the scientific side of it all: how can they be educational and why would that matter?
Well, turns out, you can use memes that relate to the content at hand to teach folks something new.
Three main tactics are suggested for this, the first of which being dual coding. This one works when there is a visual and verbal component that ties in well with what you’re teaching and it ultimately strengthens student comprehension.
The other two are using concrete examples, i.e. memes are concrete examples of abstract and complicated ideas or concepts, and elaboration, which is using memes to connect students’ personal knowledge with real world observations.
The former is used to support the students’ understanding of the material, while the latter helps them dive deeper into analysis and elaboration.
This in turn means that students can also engage with the material by explaining the memes that tie in with the topic and by creating them.
For the first one, students can be provided with appropriate memes or asked to source existing memes to explain how it connects to what they have learned in their own words.
