So after a busy few days I’ve finally got time to write up how it went. It was an excellent day and the busiest Kirkstall festival ever, as the biggest free community event in the UK with over 25,000 people going on just the one day. This meant it was a great chance to get out and speak to the public about DNA and the research we do.
On the day we really ran with two events, The first was DNA Ladders, explaining how so much DNA Fits into our cells using a rope ladder and hook-on ‘nucleotides’ this was a great springboard to talk about epigenetics.
This was a great chance to teach people about DNA and a bit of cell biology and the kids seemed to really enjoy playing at being chromatin.
The other activity that went excellently was DNA Bracelets, Using bracelets and beads of four colours we got people to make their own bracelets. This was great as it could be done at either as an introduction to base paring where one strand of ‘DNA’; was made and participants simply matched up the ‘base pairs’, the activity also allowed expansion into replication, where we could talk about the different enzymes that make it possible and also translation, allowing people to write words by coding for amino acids.
Originally I thought ordering 1500 beads was overkill but I’m glad I did as this was really well received and we got through loads. Again this activity was a great chance to speak to people about genetics, stuff like mutations and heredity.
Though we had plans and resources for another couple of activities, one around singing a gene and another, a dance activity based on mitosis, we were so busy we couldn’t cover it all and we will hopefully bring these to another event in the near future.
On the day we spoke directly to about 400 people so it was great and though tiring was excellent to speak to people outside of schools who I’d never get to talk to about my research.
As in my previous post I noticed the lack of biology specific activities that I could find on ‘Science Busking’ and having developed some of our own activities I think this first foray into it was a really great experience and one I’d love the chance to repeat again sometime.
jackg00de 