Question: why is funding the science festival important to you

Natalie Lamb answered on 11 Mar 2019:

Last year I helped organise a week-long science festival in my town with a group of other volunteers. The festival had a lot of events for kids aged 4-11. It was loads of fun! Here are some of the events we planned: Science Magic (a magician who did magic tricks based on science and then told the kids how he did the tricks), Fireworks – Real Science or Just Bangs (a show about the science behind how fireworks explode, with lots of bangs) and Zoolab (mini-beasts were brought into class and kids were shown the differences in behaviour and habitat and told how to look after them).

If I won the £500 prize money I would use it to run the week long science festival again but have even more events on that would be free for school kids to go to. I would also like to have more events for people over age 11.

The festival is important to me because I had never met a scientist when I was younger. I didn’t know it was a job people could actualy get. I grew up with my Mum, who didn’t get many GCSEs because she was looking after her grandma and would often miss out on school. I was the first one in my family to go to uni and I wasn’t really sure what I could do with my degree. I think a festival like this, meeting actual scientists could have really helped me out and probably really could have helped my Mum out too. Especially with it being free and being able to walk to get there.