Festival of the Boy - The very first event!
The very first Festival of the Boy started with virtual reality (VR). A small boy shyly approached the RESILIENCE stand and stared at the VR headsets until we asked if he wanted to have a try. This was the ímpetus for the rest of the festival.
Our molecular modelling, LEGO, clay modelling, pipetting, and alginate gel making were popular too, but VR was the star of the show. Parents were as interested in the STEM activities as the children (girls and boys), but they also wanted to know what RESILIENCE was about. They thought that using VR for technical and professional training was a great idea. One parent wanted to know how RESILIENCE was involved with vocational training because she was a lead for this in a UK organisation involved in workplace training. We spoke to her about our work with T-level colleges and degree apprenticeship providers. She was keen to learn more, noted the RESILIENCE website, and took away our colouring book and laboratory notebook workbooks to see the materials we offered for early-stage STEM education. The parents were also impressed with our workbooks and some even came back to the stand to get more copies. Our strategic placement of fruit roll up sweets (organic and free from refined sugar) near the workbooks may have helped draw the children to them, but we like to think they would have taken the books anyway.
During the break, a boy came over from a neighbouring stand to talk to us. He told us that he liked our science. We asked him if he wanted to be a scientist and he replied that it was one of his future possibilities and that he was interested in doing many things. He appeared to be five or six years old, so the maturity of this response was both comical and impressive. This led to a brief conversation about the types careers that a scientist could do. We talked about working as a patent lawyer and a scientist as well as a journalist and a scientist because we wanted him to understand that scientists do not only work in the laboratory. We did not oversimplify this information because RESILIENCE does not believe in ‘dumbing down’ information for young people and our interactions with them have generally shown us that we don’t need to.
Festival organiser, Abi Wright, said: “The children are very excited about the RESILIENCE activities and they’ve told me that they ‘loved the science’!”
We also received positive feedback from the event photographer who had a conversation with us about being part of the first work force to develop VR headsets. She was as impressed with Proteus as the children.
An interesting development from the alginate gel activity was that some children were more interested in the magnet we used to stir the gelling solution than in making the alginate gel. They wanted us to place the magnet on the magnetic stirrer and turn it at different speeds. We were grateful to them for giving us some ideas for a physics activity. This is not to say that the alginate gel activity was not a hit. We did have to intervene when some children tried to feed alginate beads to each other (this is controlled for in our risk assessment) but on the positive side, this was an opportunity to explain the difference between preparation of alginate gels for use in food compared to using the gels for biomedical purposes. We encouraged the children to explore their own chemical structures using the molecular modelling activity and drew them out on a white board to explain chemical bonds.
The pipetting activity near the modelling kits drew an audience who were sometimes so excited about pipetting that they forgot to attach the tips to micropipettes. We were often impressed by their control of the pipettes considering the limited time they had to practice using this tool.
RESILIENCE celebrates the great success of this inaugural Festival of the Boy
The festival ended with us frantically trying to let children have a last try of the VR. We had to gently take the headset from a child at the end because they didn’t want to let go of it. We were one of the last ones standing and we’re very happy to have concentrated so much fun into this wonderful event. RESILIENCE celebrates the great success of this inaugural Festival of the Boy and we’re looking forward to bringing the same joy for learning and discovery to Festival of the Girl.