Cheltenham Science Festival

Today we went along to the Cheltenham Science Festival. We had tickets booked for three events and needed an early start as we were watching Robert Winston at 10.00am! I had been so excited about finally seeing him in person. (N had been less excited after watching some of his lessons on Jamie's Dream School - a bit too much blood for her) I was confident no blood would be spilled in this experiments show :) It was really good and showed the children how to do some of the experiments in his new book, which we had conveniently purchased of course. Afterwards you could get your book signed........... so we got to meet him, he is so lovely, and a legend naturally!

 We watched a show called One Tough Cookie with Zoe Laughlin (internet photo), she explained materials and composites using biscuits. How materials can be changed, or combined into composites to be stronger and how they can be stronger in different ways with experiments to test how strong, tensile and ductile they are.

I sense lots of biscuit based experiments in the future. 

Finally we watched Stefan Gates (internet photo) and his Future Food show. It was interesting how what we eat will almost certainly have to change in the future with a growing population and less land to farm. There were lots of cooked insects being passed around to sample, along with chicken hearts. Luckily if you had a food allergy you couldn't try any of it, so that got me off the hook, not sure what N's excuse was!!

I also took part in Dr Yan's Dance Lab an experiment for the BBC show Bang Goes The Theory, they are trying to find out what your dancing says about your personality and traits. After filling in a multi page but simple questionnaire I danced on a stage and the moves were reflected in an avatar recording the information on their computer program. You had to be 18 years old to take part in the experiment but they still gave the children the opportunity to dance on the stage and watch the avatar copy their moves. N enjoyed that very much.

All in all we had an absoloutely fabulous day, N enjoyed it much more than she was expecting, and we both came home tired but with smiles on our faces.