Making Contact

Teacher Tips

Hook

• It helps to take a few quick answers to “What would you send?” without judging them. You’ll come back to these ideas later, so it’s worth noting what learners actually suggest.
• You might push back gently on whatever they propose: would an alien understand English, a photo, even have eyes to see it? It’s worth letting the difficulty settle before revealing that humans have actually tried this, rather than rushing to the reveal.
• It helps to hold onto their original ideas for the classroom activity. Returning to “You wanted to send a photo, so what would need to change about that?” makes the design challenge concrete rather than abstract.

ITZA Pathways

• On Pathway 1, you could ask “What kind of signal would convince you, personally, that it was genuinely artificial rather than natural noise?” It’s a good gut check on whether they’ve understood what makes a signal scientifically interesting.
• On Pathway 2, you might ask a learner to pick one item from the Golden Record and explain why it might confuse an alien with no human reference points. Most learners haven’t considered that our most “obvious” choices are often the least universal.
• It helps to circulate near the end and ask whether their view on communicating with aliens has changed since the hook. It’s a good temperature check before the classroom activity.

Classroom Activity

• Groups get 5 minutes to choose one sound, one image and one object, then present. It helps to keep the constraint front and centre throughout: understandable to a mind with no shared language, no shared biology, and no knowledge of Earth.
• During presentations, you could open the floor briefly after each one: “Can anyone spot a problem with this choice?” and “Would it really be understandable with zero shared context?” That’s where the real thinking happens, not in the initial planning.
• The debrief question is the point of the whole activity: “Was it harder to choose something that represents humanity well, or something that would actually be understood?” Most groups discover these are different goals, and that tension is exactly what Drake and Sagan faced.

Plenary

• It helps to push learners past a one-line answer on why we sent a message we’ll never get a reply to. You might prompt them to think about curiosity, hope, or not wanting to be alone.
• The lock-in is from Jimmy Carter, who was President of the USA in 1977, and it’s the message he recorded for the Golden Record. It’s worth naming that before reading it, since it’s a real message from a head of state, sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft. You might read it, then ask “Why does he say ‘so we may live into yours’?”