Art & Design
Cultural Literacy
Teach: Stephen Spielberg, the producer for Back to the Future, is one of the most popular directors and producers in film history. Paraphrased from Wikipedia: “He directed Jaws (1975),… considered the first summer blockbuster. His subsequent releases focused typically on science fiction/adventure films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993),… as well as serious films like The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015), and The Post (2017). He has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice. Some of his movies are also among the highest-grossing films, while his total work makes him the highest-grossing film director in history. His net worth is estimated to be more than $3 billion.”
Design
Research & Discuss: You see in the beginning of the movie how much of a brilliant, but quirky, engineer and inventor Dr. Emmett Brown is. He obviously knows a lot about science and engineering, but almost all of his inventions would be utterly impossible to sell to people. His work is ugly, glitchy, and unusable. Contrast this with Steve Jobs and the origins of Apple. Research Steve Jobs if you haven’t already. What about Steve Jobs’ principles laid the foundations for Apple to one day become the first company to be valued at over $1 trillion?
Family Connections
Children & Teenagers
Write a Short Story: Switch out Marty McFly for you! Write a short story about going back in time to when your own parents met, how you changed history, and needed to find a new way to get your parents to fall in love with each other so that you can still exist. Talk to your parents about the story of their falling in love and courtship.
Language & Thinking
Literary Devices
Speaking & Listening
Children & Teenagers
Reflect & Discuss: If you could go back in time to change a historical event, what would it be? How would the world be different? What negative consequences do you think might have come about due to the change that you made in the world’s timeline? After further thinking about it, do you still feel good about changing that part of world history? Do you think Dr. Brown made the right point when he told Marty to leave history to take its natural course?
Writing Fiction
Write a Short Story: Choose any period of history that you want to and write a story about how your entrance into the era changed the course of history and your efforts to set it back as closely to how it was supposed to.
Play
All Ages
Play: After getting acquainted with the song in the movie, have a blast-from-the-past 80s dance party listening to Back In Time by Huey Lewis & The News.
Science
Atmospheric Science
Biology & Human Body
Watch: You see several characters in their younger years and older years. What is it about the human body that explains why people age? To get an overview of the science behind aging, here is an AsapScience video on the subject.
Social Sciences
Philosophy & Logic
Children & Teenagers
Read & Discuss: The Scientific American makes a point that all time travel fiction is nonsense. Read the article and discuss the points.
Psychology
Teach & Watch: Dr. Brown tells Marty that his mother fell in love with his father due to a psychological phenomenon called the “Florence Nightingale Effect” where a nurse is more likely to fall in love with someone who she is medically treating. Florence Nightingale can be given more credit than anyone else for the nursing profession as we know it today. She drastically reduced death rates by the practices she introduced to the profession. Here is a short History channel video about her. It was her deep concern for patients that caused this phenomenon to be named after her.
Values
Life Lessons
Children & Teenagers
Teach: When Marty’s dad, George, gets bossed around in the diner by Biff to do his homework, the future mayor Goldie Wilson tells George that he needs to stand up for himself or else he will always be taken advantage of. You see from the beginning of the movie how much truth there is in what he was saying. This is why we all need to know how to stand up to bullies.