On Saturday 11th June 2022, 8 of our committee members headed out for a sunny day at the Festival of Communities in Stepney Green Park. We were all very excited to finally be able to attend an in-person event as a team. We found our stall and immediately set to work decorating it with some WISE@QMUL posters and beautiful handmade origami.
People of all ages came to plant their own sunflower seeds...
We decided to run two activities on the day, both aimed at promoting STEMM to children. The ‘draw yourself as a scientist’ activity encouraged participants to think about the breadth of STEMM careers (i.e. not just a white coat), and also tried dispel stereotypes of who can be a scientist. There were some fantastic examples of the types of scientists the children drew; from animal science, drug discovery, space science, plant science and inventors.
The ‘planting a sunflower protocol’ was a good hands-on experiment that appealed to children of all ages and allowed the visitors to take something away with them to continue their scientific observations at home. This definitely attracted children to our stall and allowed us to initiate conversations with children and adults about the diversity of careers available in STEMM.
In addition to running our own activities, we really enjoyed talking to the other stalls around us to find out about the types of work going on in Queen Mary and the community. The whole event was extremely fun with a wide variety of activities and information about vital local services. It was lovely to see how excited the children were to be attending the event, and particularly enjoyed being asked interesting questions about our work such as ‘Can you make a human out of a single cell?’, ‘What is the most exciting thing you have discovered so far?’ and ‘how many different types of scientists are there?’.
Our stalls were very busy throughout the day and we all really enjoyed engaging with the local community, including nearby schools for future outreach events. This festival is a great way to connect the work that goes on in Queen Mary with the public, and to normalise going to university and pursuing academic careers. We felt this was a fantastic opportunity to use our platform to promote diversity and inclusion in STEMM and look forward to attending again next time!