Darwin Now

The British Council  invited us to design a series of activities to support their international Darwin Now exhibition.

Darwin Now was a global initiative, run in centres across the world throughout 2009, to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin and the impact his ideas about evolution continue to have on today’s world. It was designed to complement UK celebrations of the bicentenary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his major work ‘On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection’.

We developed a suite of resources, including quizzes and a series of activities to accompany the exhibition. The quizzes were targeted at 5-11 year olds and 12-16 year olds respectively, and were designed to encourage visitors to interrogate the exhibition. The supporting activities were designed to engage visitors aged 5-14 with principles such as the evolutionary advantages of different characteristics and the impact of a creature’s environment on natural selection and survival.

One of the landscapes provided for the ‘Design your Own Animal’ activity

Activities included: Survival of the Fittest Game; Design your own Animal; Design your own Ecosystem and Colourful Butterflies. We developed ‘learning packs’ which were translated into a number of languages and consisted of a series of guides for running a Darwin Now exhibition, (for use by British Council international offices), complete with instructions on how to run the accompanying PE activities.