A highpoint of the coming weekend will be the Schools’ Zone on Saturday, which will gives school pupils and sixth form students the opportunity to communicate science for themselves; exploring everything from cars and chromatography to gravity and woodlice. The weekend will also include a talk about the upgraded large hadron collider on Saturday, whilst on Sunday, the Science Festival will be returning to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
This year, Schools’ Zone includes groups from 10 schools and sixth form colleges who will be showcasing science, technology, engineering and maths projects they have been working on in science classes and after-school science clubs. Most schools involved are local to Cambridgeshire but they will be joined by two visiting school groups from Barcelona and Japan, offering insight into science teaching around the world.
Sawston Village College and St Faith’s school have both been studying the mechanics of cars. Pupils from St Faith’s will be racing a battery-powered car, exploring the effects that design and aerodynamics can have on racing success and reliving their experiences of competing on the Goodwood circuit. Sawston Village College students will be bringing along their fully restored Sinclair C5 and discussing what was required to repair it. They will also be experimenting with non-Newtonian fluids and home-made lava lamps.
A teacher involved in Schools’ Zone, commented: “I love the schools zone; it's got better each year. I love that my students study independently to develop these projects and that they arrive at this event as cautious communicators and leave as accomplished and confident ones.”
Other technological projects include making railway controllers, pinball machines and developing image recognition software with students from the Perse School. They will be joined by the latest autonomous robots designed and built by students at Hills Road, who recently won the Robot and Team Image prize at the national Student Robotics competition.
Meanwhile, students from Bancroft’s School and Stamford High School have been looking at living things; they will bring along their woodlice, which they have been using to examine behaviour and learning. Other groups will be investigating gravity, making hydrogels, studying bioluminescence and using indicators to study acidity.
As well as this, visiting students will share their work on gliders, bio-degradable plastics and extracting scents from plants in a presentation that promises to be fragrant, sustainable and informative.
Schools’ Zone, is one of many events around West Cambridge on Saturday. Visitors can also discover the newest man-made materials and manufacturing techniques at the Institute of Manufacturing and at the newly relocated Department of Materials and Metallurgy. Events will reveal the wonders of electron microscopy, the many uses for steel and its exciting future prospects and the most recent advances in laser technology. Physicists at the IoA and Cavendish Labs will talk about the science of toys and custard fireballs. The Centre for Mathematical Sciences is also promising their biggest and most exciting open day yet.
Elsewhere around the city, the Botanic Garden will be revealing the wonders of trees and the Sedgwick Museum will be hosting a laboratory open day. In addition, there will be a series of talks at the historic Cambridge Union, including a discussion of Gender and conservation and comedy performances from Festival favourite, Robin Ince.
On the final day of the 2015 Festival, focus will shift to the Biomedical Campus around Addenbrooke’s hospital. There will be appearances from the Naked Scientists and actor Stephen McGann, from BBC’s Call the Midwife, will present Infectious knowledge: science in popular culture, which looks at the need for greater integration of science into entertainment media. Other talks at the Clinical School, will include Pioneers in hospital computing, Head injury: a survivor’s story and the Cambridge University Hospital Chair’s Lecture: a stroll through critical illness.
Hands-on sessions at the Clinical School and Deakin Centre will reveal the importance of statistics and computational modelling, as well as examining drug therapy, fat and snot. Papworth Hospital will be bringing along a surgery simulator, and CRUK Cambridge Institute are offering visitors the chance to get to grips with cancer and discussing the hype behind the headlines in Hands off my health records: why sharing your health data matters.
Other Festival events taking place over the weekend:
20 March – Solar eclipse viewing at the IoA. A safe eclipse viewing for a partial Solar eclipse, with short talks about solar eclipses and a live feed, expert commentary from locations where a total eclipse is visible and telescope observations, weather permitting.
21 March – Longitude found. Tales of challenges, rewards, skull-duggery and sailors lost at sea retold by Dr Rebekah Higgitt (University of Kent), exploring the story of finding longitude.
21 March – Pecha Kucha challenge. Graduate students in engineering will take on the challenge of sharing their research in just 6 min 40 sec. Will they succeed?
22 March – A trick of the light? How petal surfaces attract pollinators. The Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Professor Beverley Glover shows how structures on petal surfaces attract pollinators.
22 March – Light entertainment. Discover how light was used to provide entertainment in the 19th century, experiment with magic lanterns and build your own camera obscura.
For further information about the Cambridge Science Festival or to browse the full range of events, please visit: www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk
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