Choosing the target audience

^{Banks et al. (2007)} coined the phrase "Life-long, Life-wide, and Life-deep" to encapsulate the notion that most learning takes place throughout our lives, in formal and informal environments, and in ways that are acceptable to our local community (i.e. connected to religious, moral, ethical, and social values). These "life-learning" ideas arise from the realization that a small percentage of people's lives are spent in structured, formal learning environments (18.5 percent for Grades 1-12; 9.7 percent for undergraduates; 5.1 percent for graduates; and occasionally as adults). Since learners learn by asking questions, science learning will happen more often if their informal environments are science-rich. Furthermore, Banks and colleagues noted the majority culture is well served with currently available materials but that there is a need for an equitable amount of materials for diverse audiences. Since movies have an appeal that crosses socioeconomic and geopolitical boundaries, we decided to create a presentation about chemistry in the movies for students who are underrepresented in chemistry.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln hosts two different science camps that target students of interest. The Young Nebraska Scientists camp is hosted by the Nebraska EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) program and targets middle and high school students from rural areas, low-income urban areas, and favors students who are returning for a second year. The Nebraska College Preparatory camp is linked to an academic program at select high schools with high enrollments of Hispanic and African-American students. Separate camps for rising 10th graders and rising 11th graders take place over three days and two nights in June or July, during which time the campers attend lectures, learn methods, and analyze data.

When we explained to the camp director that our presentation was designed to help campers to think more chemically, she arranged for us to give talks during the special enrichment seminar that takes place in the evening. We have now given presentations over three years to almost twenty summer camps and hundreds of campers. In the first year, all camps experienced our talk, "Everything I Know About Chemistry, I Learned at the Movies." The majority of clips in that talk were chosen because they were already being used in Griep's introductory chemistry course for non-majors. The student responses to that talk have been published (^{Griep & Mikasen, 2013}; ^{Griep et al., 2012}). Since some campers return the following summer, we developed a second talk titled "Alien Biochemistry and Extraterrestrial Minerals in the Movies" (Fig. 1). Both these talks were used during the second and third years of our participation in the summer camps. With the creation of the Alien Biochemistry talk, we sought to connect it more directly to the things they were learning in their day camp experiences.

Figure 1 Graphic for the presentation titled "Alien Biochemistry and Extraterrestrial Minerals in the Movies". The elements mentioned in the presentation are in movie theater seats arranged in the form of the periodic table. The celestial bodies on the screen were inspired by those in Duck Dodgers in the 241/2 Century (1953), one of the movies used in the presentation. 

Designing the presentation

Youth participating in both camps learn how to create transgenic fluorescent microbes. An effective way to transform observations into knowledge that learners can use in new contexts is to anchor it to things they already know (^{Hofstein & Kempa, 1985}; ^{Rivet & Krajcik, 2008}; ^{Sherwood, Kinzer, Bransford, & Franks, 1987}). Anchoring is necessary because the cognitive load perspective postulates that working memory is limited, making it difficult for learners to process too many ideas at once (^{Carlson, Chandler, & Sweller, 2003}). For example, a recent study demonstrated that a "relevance" intervention was successful in improving interest and grades in chemistry for students with low expectations about their own ability to do well in chemistry (^{Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009}). Since our campers were amplifying genes from plasmids, inserting them into vectors, and then expressing the cloned gene inside a bacterium, we reasoned that a presentation about the elements of life would connect very well. Our familiarity with movies about chemistry suggested we would be able to find this material in science fiction movies.

Many of the most-watched movies ever made have a science fiction theme. According to BoxOffice Mojo (www.boxofficemojo.com), Avatar (2009) is the highest grossing film of all time. In fact, about one-fifth of the Top 100 Grossing Films are in the science fiction category. The genre lends itself well to stories about the individual vs. nature that are told within the context of fantastic environments and novel experiences.

The first step in creating a presentation about the chemistry is to assemble a tentative list and then to group the entries into categories. Since the Internet Movie Database (IMDB; www.imdb.com) is the largest movie database, we began searching there first. It was not especially fruitful because IMDB does not have a specific tagging system. Their keywords are created by individual reviewers based on their own interests, and it would appear that the reviewers are not especially interested in chemistry. Instead, our list was created over a period of years. The most productive sources were two science fiction movie encyclopedias and four books about the Saturday morning serials that were popular from the 1930s to the early 1950s (^{Barbour, 1970}; ^{Hardy, 1986}; ^{Kinnard, 1998}; ^{Rainey, 1999}; ^{Warren, 1982}, ¹⁹⁸⁶; ^{Weiss & Goodgold, 1972}). Supplementing those were more specialized books that described some movies in enough detail to reveal possible chemical scenes (^{Galbraith, 1994}; ^{Glassy, 2001}; ^{Noonan, 2005}; ^{Sontag, 1974}). Some discoveries were made while reading books about two successful science fiction writers, H.G. Wells and Michael Crichton, whose works have inspired numerous screenplays (^{Smith, 2002; Trembley, 1996}). A colleague alerted us regarding The Andromeda Strain (1971), which was released many years ago, and we found it to be such an excellent example of chemistry in the movies that we described it in our book ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies (^{Griep & Mikasen, 2009}). Finally, the most recent movies on these lists were added because we watched them when they were released or because of a tip from another chemist/movie enthusiast.

After identifying movies that might have chemical scenes, it was possible to separate the films into three categories: alien biochemistry, extraterrestrial minerals, and aliens are short on fuel (Tables 1- Table 3). There are 14 movies in which alien biochemistry is described in some way and two in which the biochemistry is strongly implied (Table 1). In District 9 (2009), the aliens can eat Earth food and their excreted goo is able to infect a human. In Superman Returns (2006), the alien being Kal-El (aka Clark Kent, aka Superman) is able to have a child with human Lois Lane. These movies, and probably many others, imply that human genetics are very similar to genetics of the aliens, which in turn implies they have virtually the same biochemistry. We decided to focus on movies that mention elements so that we could incorporate the periodic table, the central organizing principle of chemistry, into our informal science education presentation.

The extraterrestrial minerals mentioned in some movies are composed of the same elements as found on Earth, such as helium, beryllium, and titanium (Table 2). A related theme is that aliens ran out of their own fuel and have come to Earth for our uranium (Table 3). This implies that the universe is composed of the same building blocks. On the other hand, most of the minerals in Table 2 and one of them in Table 3 are fictional elements, often with unusual properties. Examples are that unobtainium is a room-temperature superconductor, serranium converts energy into matter and grows, and lunarium is a special element found only on our Moon. In fact, lunarium found its way into two Saturday morning serials.

Feature films (and theatrically released cartoons) were created to entertain rather than educate so that many of them get very creative when including chemistry. We feel it is important to address all examples of chemistry in the movies to let our audience know what is real and what is fake. This is especially important for audiences with limited prior exposure to chemistry in the classroom because they do not know how to distinguish whether it is real or fake. In our book ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies (2010), we note that the narrative for most chemistry shown in movies is described correctly and is based on real chemistry. But, we also describe some movies with fictional molecules that can be related to real chemistry. In our presentations, it does not matter whether the movie clip shows real or fake chemistry, as long as it has a high Wow! to provoke the audience to want to know whether it is real or fake. In our presentations, we satisfy this thirst for knowledge through a mini-lesson following each clip. Our hidden agenda is to cause our audience members to ponder on the chemistry they observe in the next movie or television show they watch.

There are several reasons for the popularity of fictional elements in books, comics, and science fiction stories. One example is from the comic book Uncle Scrooge No. 17 (1957) in which Walt Disney's miserly old duck handles bombastium, the "rarest element known to man" that "nobody knows what it is good for (^{Carter, 1988})." In the 1980s, the writer of that comic explained that he was making a joke about all of the long-named actinides that were being discovered in the 1950s but for which there was no known use. In fact, Krell lead isotope 217 from Forbidden Planet (1956) is also used for comic effect as are the beryllium spheres in Galaxy Quest (1999). Although beryllium is a real element, the idea that one can harvest large spheres of them from a planet's surface is absurd. Isaac Asimov described two more reasons for using fictional elements-to launch the story or to get the hero out of a jam (^{Asimov, 1974}). A recent example of story launch is Avatar (2009), where we learn about unobtainium in the first few minutes of the film but which is hardly mentioned again in the next 2 h.

Although some reviews and summaries are very well written, they rarely describe the chemistry scenes in any detail. For this reason, it is usually not possible to determine how useful the chemistry will be until we watch it. Therefore, the next step is to watch some movies so we can critique them from a chemical perspective. We watched as many as were available to purchase. It is important that there is a single short scene (about 3 min in length) in which the chemistry is sufficiently described to be useful for instructional purposes. Then, the specific movie clips are extracted and edited for the presentation and a correlating chemical education explanation developed. These explanations are given in ^{Griep (2015)}. The first clips to emerge were from The Andromeda Strain, Men in Black II , and Duck Dodgers in the 241/2 Century . The last two were discovered early enough to become part of our presentation titled "Everything I Know About Chemistry, I Learned at the Movies" that we described previously (^{Griep & Mikasen, 2013; Griep et al., 2012}). With these three clips as the nucleus for a presentation, we assembled a talk about the chemistry of aliens and minerals from outer space while maintaining a focus on the periodic table during the explanations (Table 4).

The fictional material "illudium phosdex" was chosen as the last movie clip in the presentation because it is make-believe and unexpected. As we reach the end of the presentation, we expect the audience will be wondering how we are going to mine some educational content out of a theatrically released cartoon. During the 1:32 min long clip, the audience learns from Dr. I.Q. Hi (voice of Mel Blanc), Secretary of the Stratosphere, that the "World's supply of illudium phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low." After the clip, the students are asked one question-"What type of material is illudium phosdex: Element, Compound, or Mixture?" When someone answers mixture or compound, they are asked how they reached that conclusion. The typical answers are that shaving cream has to be a mixture or that it must be a compound based on its two-part name. They are told these are reasonable conclusions but that this is a cartoon and you need to be careful when drawing a conclusion. They are then asked to remember what else they learned from the clip. Inevitably, one of the campers remembers the phrase "shaving cream atom" and realizes that illudium phosdex is an element.

Assessing the experience

The clips and accompanying explanations were assembled into a 55-min Powerpoint^(r) presentation, the script of which is available online (^{Griep, 2015}). After watching each movie clip, campers were asked to rate its amount of Wow! from 1 to 5, where 5 is high (^{Griep et al., 2012}). Next, campers listened to and participated in each explanation and rated "How much chemistry did you learn?" also from 1 to 5, where 5 is high. At the end of the presentation, they were asked to place a code name on their ratings sheets, which were then gathered, shuffled, and randomly chosen to determine the order in which door prizes were awarded.

This method was described in a recently published book chapter (^{Griep & Mikasen, 2013}). Briefly, the Wow! rating provides an assessment of audience feelings about the entertainment value for each clip. The "How much chemistry did you learn?" rating measures their feelings about how much chemistry they learned. Our original hypothesis was that movie clips with high Wow! would encourage the audience to be more attentive while learning the real chemistry associated with the clip and yield a correspondingly high Learning rating. Instead, we found that students and teachers showed a high correlation for Learning or Pedagogical Utility but not for their Wow! ratings. Furthermore, there is a high correlation for Learning and Pedagogical Utility whether the responses were from middle school students in the classroom, middle and high school students in summer science camps, college students attending an evening lecture, or senior citizens attending a life-long learning course. In short, there appears to be a universal interpretation of whether chemistry was learned or taught that is independent of the personal response to the Wow! of the clip. Movies and the scenes within them connect with us strongly because they arouse our emotions. We want the audience's opinions about how much Wow! a particular scene holds for them so that we know which movie clips connect most strongly. When chemistry is part of the narrative, it carries a complex emotional content related to the actors in the scene, the dialog they use to describe the chemistry, and the realism of the chemical apparatus.