Survival Rivals

I’m a Worm, Get Me Out of Here – Video Transcript

Voiceover: “Welcome to I’m a Worm, Get Me Out of Here. It’s a fantastic experiment, it’s free, and it’s easy to set up. For a quick overview and some great advice on how to conduct the experiment, keep watching.

“We’re here in Sheffield for a worms-eye-view of how the kit works, but don’t worry, no worms were harmed in the making of this film – instead we used spaghetti!”

Mr Galvin (in classroom): “What I want you to do is to feed back at the board, so we’re going to do constants first of all, and there we’re going to do the problems with the practical.”

Mr Galvin (interview): “A couple of weeks ago we started putting the bird seed down on to the table and that was kind of to draw the birds in and then a week or so ago we started putting spaghetti onto the bird table to get the birds used to, you know, eating it and having it there, and then actually started the experiment proper today.”

Voiceover: “Choice of feeding site is important. Here at King Edward’s in Sheffield they have an excellent spot next to some woodland. But you can still use concrete areas so long as you have a bird feeder or a marked out space. It also needs to be somewhere birds are happy to come and feed, otherwise this particular bushtucker trial won’t get anywhere.”

Mr Galvin (in classroom): “Ok so we’ve got the beautiful green worms and we’ve got the wonderful red worms and you in your pairs are going to get them cut up properly, put them in a bag, and then we’ll nip outside (with about twenty layers on) and try and not get hypothermia and can put these outside, ok?”

Voiceover: “This school in Sheffield have opted for five centimetre worms, but you can use whatever length you like. Gloves aren’t essential but if you don’t use them the students must wash their hands thoroughly, as birds can carry diseases.”

Mr Galvin (interview): “Experimental design was much more complicated than it first looked, it looked like a very simple experiment at first. But they delved deeper into it and there were more and more problems that they had to control and once they’d chosen their variable, the colour, they had a whole myriad of other things to look at.”

First girl in classroom: “Could you put, like, other animals?”
Second girl: “Um, I don’t know whether other animals would really count, because I suppose… well actually…”
Third girl: “Cause different animals would like different things…”

First boy in classroom: “If you place it on the floor, it’ll be trampled…”

Second boy (speaking to cameraman): “There is some woodland area around there, so yeah, a lot of birds will be there.”

Fourth girl (writing on whiteboard): “The squirrels might eat our spaghetti, so there’d be none left for the birds.”

Mr Galvin: “Good. So how could you control that then?”
Fourth girl: “Well, you could get an anti-squirrel bird table.”
Mr Galvin: “You know, that’s a great idea, and another way of doing it is just adding a bit of chilli to the pasta because the birds can’t taste the chilli, but the squirrels can.”

Voiceover: “If you want to get the best out of the kit, you’ll need to keep feeding for a week or two. That way you’ll get some really strong data. You can easily repeat the experiment; all you need is more pasta and food dye. Which makes I’m a Worm, Get Me Out of Here something that’ll run and run.”

Girl (interviewed): “I enjoy doing experiments more than I do written work so it was good fun.”
Boy (interviewed): “I think it was pretty fun but it could have been better if we had more colours so we get a better range of answers.”
Girl: “I’m looking forward to getting the results and I think the reds will have disappeared the most ‘cause I think that’s the most natural colour to a worm, rather than the vibrant green.”
Boy: “I think the greens might have disappeared the most ‘cause birds are used to hunting worms in grass, which is the same colour as green, so I think a load of greens are going to have gone.”

Mr Galvin (interview): “Yeah, I’d definitely recommend the experiment to other people. I know we’re all busy as teachers, but it’s a good experiment, the results are obvious and it did get the kids motivated.”