Science Club

Luxembourg. Last week I visited the Science Club of the museum mnhn and participated in a free guided tour of the RTL studios.

The Science Club offers regularly workshops and visits for young people from age 11 to 18. One can participate in the events partly for free or to low prices. Inscription and informationexchange is uncomplicated via their website. The meetings guarantee a nice meet-up in Luxembourgish.

Arriving at the meeting point RTL, the group was easily to identify because of the teenagers and their animated conversations. I was kindly welcomed and could listen to regulars who exchanged their experiences to prior events and workshops. After all expect participants were present, the guided tour began in the television studios of RTL.

After visiting the big and the small studio, the group was allowed to stand behind the newsreader’s desk in the news studio while learning many interesting and funny details of the daily life in a television studio.

How long it takes to adjust all the lights (in the big studio it takes up to a day), to technical questions (e.g. we were able to take a look at the glass screens in front of the cameras which work as a mirror to reflect the text in the way that the presenter can read without having to lose the focus of the camera), and how the greenbox is used: many questions were answered. The greenbox for example is important for weather forecasts and the sports show, because cards and statistics can be edited in the background and do not have to be on an installed screen. A small monitor on the side-wall gives the moderator the possibility to control where to point on the edited figures. Our guide, a former weatherman, was able to add a small anecdote about this monitor: as ritual for initiates it would be common to be distracted by the colleagues who show a distracting picture on the monitor for the new weatherman during his first live-broadcast.

Spontaneously we were also allowed to visit the neighbouring studios of the radio. In the sound studio we were able to record a few phrases and experiment with the microphone. For the end it was obligatory to greet with a “Moien, mir sinn de Science Club”.

And with this I am closing my field report as well.

Maybe you will be there the next time, too.

The current program of the Science Club is available here: https://www.science-club.lu/