Speaker: Dr Matthew McFall, University of Nottingham -

Matthew McFall

What would happen in a school if you had classrooms full of wonder? What would be the effect on learning and motivation if you focussed less on teaching knowledge and more on developing curiosity and wonder in your learners?  And, for that matter, what is wonder, what does it feel like to do it and why wonder, anyway?

These are questions that are vexing the quite extraordinary mind of one of Independent Thinking's newest and most magical Associates.

Matthew is a magician who is currently researching for a second doctorate at the Learning Sciences Research Institute and School of Education, University of Nottingham (his first was from Oxford, focussing on humour and "twist endings" in early twentieth-century macabre fiction). He is currently wondering about curiosity, motivation and the use of magic and puzzles as tools for learning and how wonder might be generated in classrooms. It has led to the design of the Wonder Box system - a sequence of playful and unexpected devices designed to surprise, engage, and initiate quests for wonderful objects, artefacts, and experiences. He is also piloting the use of Cabinets of Curiosities and labyrinths as stimuli for engagement and creativity.

Hooked on conjuring since he received his first magic set at the age of four, Matthew's love of the art and craft of magic has led to a range of unusual commissions and inventions including Wonder in Carbonland for the Royal Society and Cabinet of Tiny Curiosities for Nanoworlds at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in 2008. Other research currently vexing him includes 'Histories of Trickery' and 'Conjuring Apparatus and Analogue Ingenuity'.

He is also an authority on lichen...