UCLan’s Lancashire Science Festival attracted around 13,000 people who engaged with the shows, workshops, exhibits and activities over three days.
Among this year’s attractions at the award-winning event were Titan the Robot, a petting zoo, The Cloud Factory and the Royal Institution’s Feel The Power.
Other highlights included the maths behind Disney and Pixar films, the wonders of water plus the animal detectives.
The three-day event offered a wide variety of activities to inspire youngsters about the real-world applications of science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine.
Dr Liz Granger, Lancashire Science Festival Director, said: “It’s been amazing to see around 20,000 people on our campus and at the high school roadshows who were fully engaged with the wide variety of science, engineering, technology and maths (STEM) activities we had on offer. Every year our award-winning Lancashire Science Festival gets bigger and this year was no exception. The weather played a huge part too in bringing families of all ages out for a free summertime event.
“To see the mass appeal of a free STEM related festival is wonderful and it shows the appetite of schools and parents to bring children along and inspire the next generation.”
See how we inspired and enthralled the future generations of scientists on the UCLan Flickr gallery.
This year the JHI showfloor exhibit had even more interactive demonstrations. Visitors enjoyed pushing our magnetic levitating train around the track as well as watching us smash flowers with liquid nitrogen! Visitors were able to light up fluorescent tubes with our plasma globe and learn how cool colours and patterns can be seen using polarising filters. Younger children particularly enjoyed our modified 10ft trampoline which they threw marbles around to demonstrate space-time! Visitors built some very impressive constructions in our 
polydrom shape pits and also enjoyed taking part in our three-sided coin experiment. The JHI exhibit was manned by undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as JHI staff, who all did a great job of enthusing our visitors despite the sauna-like conditions in the sports hall!
In the lead up to the LSF, Dr Karen Syres also performed demonstrations for a Live Science event which was streamed live on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v-dp7WPoU0) and watched by local schools.
Top Image: JHI’s Professor Victor Debattista talking to an aspiring young scientist.