Curiosity Live weekend at the Glasgow Science Festival

What a thrilling experience this weekend at the Glasgow Science Center. It feels so great and cool to explain our work to people from all backgrounds and ages. Over this weekend we’ve seen many groups of kids and also parents and seniors. I start my pitch and look at their faces to adapt and make it simpler or go into further details. I talk about our work with bone regeneration technologies, new materials and understanding of stem cell biology. It’s amazing how much all people are interested and fascinated by science.

Kids loved anything that can be touched, like our jelly experiments to test different stiffness of gels and our mystery box of hard and soft tissues. Kids and adults alike lit up when looking through the microscopes. We looked at samples of a bone chip and a 3D printed synthetic material mimicking the natural bone scaffold structure. We had stem cells that had been previously prepared in our labs to be differentiated to bone, muscle or fat cells, showing their different morphologies and features of the cells. Most adults that stopped and engaged with any of us stayed for the whole pack of talks and stations that we have prepared. Some kids and adults are not immediately interested or understand what we are talking about, and those challenges become also a very rewarding experience and a great test for our knowledge of the matter at hand.

We’ve had for a few weeks a team at CeMi creating all the materials and activities at our stall. Most of it has been nothing super fancy, although it took quite some time and thinking to prepare, like gelatin gels with a range of stiffness, plastic 3D printed pieces for models, and posters and videos for the stall screens, all incredibly useful to help with talks and conversations. It has been very motivating to see how much people have enjoyed just talking to us. We looked really nice and sharp with our new polo shirts with the CeMi logo!

The Curiosity Live event at the Glasgow Science Centre ran 15th – 17th June as part of the Glasgow Science Festival 2018, with researchers on hand to celebrate and share their exciting research with visitors.

This post was written by Andres Alba-Perez from notes by Cristina Gonzalez-Garcia.