What is the Festival about?
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The Festival will take place 12th - 19th February 2020. The Festival is based on the principle that science is creative and should play a greater role in our cultural lives, and not be remote, hidden away or only conducted in labs. The Festival seeks to take STEM into local communities, where people can directly engage and interact with it. All people, especially children, are naturally curious and the Festival seeks to encourage everyone to express their curiosity and ask questions.
What are we looking for?
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We are looking for hands-on, interactive and creative activities which can be delivered to public audiences with no prior knowledge of the subject matter. These could be table-top activities, experiments, games, workshops, installations, competitions, shows... the more imaginative the better! Previous activities have included:
- a reaction time testing game
- an installation of the Orion constellation
- a workshop with young people about online data
- a trail with four different taxidermy animals, tackling misconceptions about Bovine TB
- a make-your-own brain hat activity
We encourage applications from academics from all disciplines and all career stages - biochemists to geologists, including social science and humanities, undergrads to profs.
What is the Festival format?
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Wednesday 12th - Friday 14th Feb - Schools programme
We develop activities specifically for schools to take part in, including off-site workshops (at Broadway cinema and Wollaton Hall for example) and assemblies and other presentations in school. For 2020, we will be running a programme of primary school investigations into air quality. We also support scientists to collaborate with artists and pupils to produce projects which creatively interpret STEM. We are not looking for activities for the schools programme with this form. However if you are interested in working with schools, please contact
megan@ignitefutures.org.uk.
Saturday 15th Feb - City Centre
Saturday is the main public day of the festival, where venues will include Broadmarsh shopping centre, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham Central Library, Urban Room, Wollaton Hall, Sneinton Market and more TBC. Typical audiences are families with young children and there will be people who have come because they have seen the events advertised as well as others who just happen upon the events. Different venues will have different timings, but there will be activities running 9am - 6pm. We also run 'Lates' events for a more adult audience, such as comedy nights and workshops.
Monday 17th Feb - Wednesday 19th Feb - Communities programme
This is when we take festival activities out into community libraries during the half-term break and this year we will be going to St Ann's, Hyson Green and Aspley. Activities will run 10am - 2pm and the audience is generally local families who have come specifically for the activities.
All week - Lates
This is our programme for adults that includes comedy nights, informal talks in pubs, a quiz and more. We're really interested to hear from people who have exciting and novel ideas for engaging a diverse range of adult audiences with science and curiosity.
Notes
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It is free to present an activity at the Festival; we are unable to pay for activities, but we can provide advice regarding funding if necessary.
If your activity would benefit from being paired with an artist, creative practitioner or group of young people, we can help link you up.
If you want to be involved, but need some help developing your idea, please email
megan@ignitefutures.org.uk. We have lots of experience developing and presenting interactive activities for all ages.
