Fun for 2000 kids

Last weekend ScienceGrrl had a stall at the amazing Lancashire Science Festival. If you missed it – get the dates in your diary ready for next year! Here is a report of the event from ScienceGrrl Liz Britland.

This is the third year in a row we’ve volunteered at the event and it gets bigger and better each time. We play our ‘I’m a ScienceGrrl talk to me’ game and it always goes down a storm even with the older kids.

The aim of the game is to find X number of ScienceGrrls (a number I usually decide on the day depending on the number of volunteers) and ask them a question about science, what they do for a career or why they got into that line of work. The ScienceGrrls then get to feel like celebrities and sign the kids’ cards which they’ve been given, once they’ve met X number of ScienceGrrls they get a free badge.

We had over 2000 kids take part in 3 days which is phenomenal! They LOVE it!!!

As well as the game, we also had ‘Draw a Scientist’ station on Saturday which had lots of entries for our ‘Wall of Fame’ (see rows of postcards behind Donal in the pictures below). The idea was to draw the first thing that came into your head when you thought who a scientist was  – mine had a martini glass in hand and was a stick figure representation of a Scientist on a Friday!

As ScienceGrrls should, we took part in the Lancashire Science Festival Lates events as well as the day time madness. We had a fabulous Science Ceilidh with Lewis Hou and the boys which was painful, fun, tiring, educational and most of all… sweaty! Then onto the Science of Cocktails with Noel Jackson which was delicious and informative.

So that was my weekend at #LSF15 with fellow ScienceGrrls Abigail Ickringill, Heather Williams, Donal Brannigan, Jon Wood and all the other people who volunteered to be ScienceGrrls for a day (including Dr. Allison Jones Dean of School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences – see pic) who together made our little stand the best it’s ever been!!!”