By our reckoning, you could spend 15 hours of lesson time on it (or more) if you wanted to, but most of you probably won’t!
The key thing is giving the students the chance to interact with the engineers, so definitely try to have at least two sessions online – a live chat and a session for submitting questions. And at least a short follow up on these to see the answers and how the voting is progressing.
But remember, if time is short you can set visiting the site as homework. In I’m a Scientist in June 2010 over 50% of students who answered our survey logged on to the site from home, in their own time, to see how it was going.
If you want to spend a lot longer there are 6 hours of lesson plans, plus information sheets. And there are four debate kits for you to choose from, online – you could use two in different lessons, to give them more practice. We have also made blank debate kit templates to download so you can develop your own.