Using “One should really play more!” as title of a presentation in a serious scientific colloquium might seem like a bold move, but the gamble payed off: a large, interested audience including everyone from students to professors enthusiastically dropped ice cubes and food dye in our LEGO-driven rotating tanks and passionately discussed their observations.

On Monday, Torge and I gave a presentation in the “Ocean Circulation and Climate Dynamics” colloquium at GEOMAR. After briefly presenting the context of our PerLe-funded “Dry Theory to Juicy Reality” project, we invited everybody to play, no wait … conduct experiments with four of our rotating tanks that we had set up. Nils, Ludwig, Jakob and Hendrik from our current atmosphere and ocean dynamics class were there to help out at each of the tanks to make sure that people actually dared to touch the equipment but also make sure that they would see something meaningful in each experiment.

Since our students are currently writing blog posts about all of the experiments presented here, and we will publish those over the next week or so, we will leave you with the brilliant pictures that student David Menzel (www.spp-movies.com) took and hope that you will come back to read about the experiments!