Understanding your audience is one of the most important things in effective science communication.

Contributor Emily Porter

{credit}Image credit: Bhagesh Sachania{/credit}

What do you get if you add foam yoga blocks, Hungry Hippos, scientists and kids together? A mixture of mayhem, learning and wonder.

Over the past few months I’ve been getting involved in the Bristol Festival of Nature, an event that celebrates all things science and nature.  Despite initially volunteering to help out more generally, I soon found myself agreeing to design and run an activity with a couple of PhD students, Luke Lazarou and Barney Wharam. We spent many hours discussing the best way to make virus epitopes and white blood cell receptors using foam bricks and genetic codes, and how we could modify Hungry Hippo games to become Hungry Macrophages games.

We were developing our activity for the Bristol University tent, which showcases the university’s research to a broad audience over three days, including one day when the Festival is open only to visiting schools. IIt was my first experience of developing an activity, and I wanted to share what I learned so that others looking to do some festival work can learn too.

Audience. It is crucial that you consider your audience. Visitors to the festival ranged from pre-primary school age children to grandparents, including science teachers and university staff, so our activity used varying difficulties of genetic sequences, from assembling simple colour sequences to interpreting amino acid tables, to cater for everyone. Never underestimate the amount of knowledge that can be picked up from everyday life; when children were asked if they knew what a virus was, answers varied from ‘like in a computer?’ to ‘a verruca’, and the term ’DNA’ was recognised from the TV series. Continue reading →