McGILL WEB GEMS

Courtroom drama

By Mark Shainblum | Join us as we unearth the hidden gems and secret places on the websites of McGill University and its affiliated institutions.

The McGill Shakespeare Moot Court
www.mcgill.ca/shakespearemoot

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
—William Shakespeare

That infamous line was actually uttered by an unsavoury character named Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part 2, although the bard himself might not have had anything against legal professionals, he wasn't above getting a cheap laugh at their expense. Four hundred and fifteen years later, all is forgiven, at least at McGill, where an intriguing collaboration between students from the Faculty of Law and the Department of English produced the annual Shakespeare Moot Court. Six teams each made up of one undergrad from Law and one from English compete in a unique melding of the traditions of drama and the moot court to designed to think about "Shakespeare as law, just as we think of the Civil Code or the judgments of the Supreme Court as law." You can read all the supporting documentation and watch the "performances" on video.

WOW Lab
www.mcgill.ca/wowlab
www.mcgill.ca/wowlab/train

McGill's WOW Lab was set up in 2007 as an initiative in elementary and high school science education. The objective is to develop cool math and science teaching technologies which will maximize student "excitement, amazement and amusement." One of their first publicly available projects is "the little engine that did," a very slick, highly amusing video of a model train which magically levitates on magnetic lines of force. Check out the video links on the second URL above.

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