DSEC Workshops

The DSEC Lab is available to run workshops for ages 8 to 16 on emotional expressions, nonverbal cues, research methods, and more! Teachers can register to receive our workshops through Let’s Talk Science, for both online and in-person programming (Request our workshop here!). Parents can find our workshops through camp Science Quest and Q camps.

If your organization is interested in partnering with us, please reach out to us as dseclab@queensu.ca

Below you will find an example of our camp workshops we did this past summer!

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION GAME - HEADS UP!

In this activity, youth are invited to practice expressing and detecting emotion using nonverbal cues! In this game, youth will use just their facial expressions to discover which emotions are the easiest to express and which are the hardest to express!

Participants will pair up for this activity. While one person holds an emotion card to their forehead, the other person tries to get their partner to guess the emotion label using their facial expressions only (i.e., without saying any words). Once their partner correctly guesses the emotion, they put the card in the “correct” pile and move on to the next emotion. If their partner guesses wrong, they place the card in the “incorrect” pile and move on to the next emotion card. If a youth is struggling to guess the emotion for quite some time, they can choose to “pass” and place the card at the bottom of the emotion card pile (and come back to this emotion at the end).

You can find the printable cards in the PDF below!

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION GAME - LISTEN

In this activity, youth are invited to practice expressing and detecting emotion using nonverbal cues! In this game, youth will use just their tone of voice to find their partner(s) and discover that it’s not always what we say that matters most, but the way we say it!

For this activity, each participant will receive a sentence card that has both a written sentence to say and a “tone” or “way” to say it. There will be 2 other people (total of 3) who all receive the exact same card. Without showing their card, participants will walk around the room and say their sentence to others with the goal of finding the 2 other people who share their same “tone”. 

You can find the printable cards in the PDF below!