BrumSciComm goes CoCoMAD – again!
Chris Hamlett and a team of volunteers returned to the CoCoMAD festival in Birmingham, armed with lemons, slinkies, a thermal imaging camera and much more – inspiring the public with their popular science outreach activities. Chris received a grant from our Outreach Fund towards the cost of delivering outreach activities at the festival.
AUTHOR: Chris Hamlett
Last year a group of ten volunteers from BrumSciComm, supported by a grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ‘Outreach Small Grant’ scheme formed the CoCoMADScientists to deliver science outreach activities at the Cotteridge Community Music Art and Dance (CoCoMAD) festival. CoCoMAD is a free community festival in Cotteridge Park, South Birmingham, which has been running every year since 1997.
This year we were invited back and, helped by Sarah Cosgriff (co-founder of BrumSciComm) and a team of twelve of volunteers, delivered a mix of newly developed activities mixed in with some old favourites.
Despite the blazing hot weather, and clashing with England’s World Cup quarter final, the CoCoMADScientists engaged with hundreds of people via busking and hands-on activities, in addition to several stage shows on the CoCoLounge Stage. Busks included blowing big bubbles, popping balloons with lemons and making cool, sci-fi sounds with a slinky.
In addition to some of the favourite hands-on activities from last year’s event – such as Mission Starlight and badge making – we developed new activities including ‘Water Lot of Fun’, ‘The Wonderful World of Lemons’ and ‘The Heat is On’.
‘Water Lot of Fun’ introduced the concept of surface tension – how plants use this property to keep clean and how surface tension can be modified to help stabilised bubbles.
‘The Wonderful World of Lemons’ allowed participants to explore some of interesting properties of lemons, such as how they pop balloons (using limonene in the skin), change the colour of red cabbage juice (also demonstrating naturally occurring pH indicators) and even help light an LED (introducing the concept of electrochemistry).
‘The Heat is On’ used a thermal imaging camera (also used on busks around the festival site) to visualise heat changes of commercially available instant cool packs and heat patches in order to introduce the concept of thermal chemistry.
The talks featured fizzy rockets, bubbles, surfactants and even how we can learn from honeybees and some CoCoMAD Scientists, eager for more stage time, showed off their favourite busking activities on stage.
The public, especially school aged children, got very involved and a pair of nine-year-olds took it upon themselves to help clean part of the stand (after an unaccompanied child tipped a beaker of red cabbage indicator over the bench!) and proceeded to help explain an experiment on bubble stabilisation to other children.
We received plenty of feedback on bespoke feedback cards and comments included ‘This stand is great for inspiring children ‘and ‘I can’t wait to come back‘.
The organisers of CoCoMAD were so pleased with how our project went that they have asked us to organise an entire science festival next year at CoCoMAD and have proposed including an ‘S’ in the festival name to reflect how popular our science activities are. Therefore, there may be a request for a specific Royal Society of Chemistry stand at the festival next year.
If you are interested in becoming a STEM Ambassador please have a look at their website for more information. If you are already a STEM Ambassador and would like to be involved in next year's edition of CoCoMAD look out for our call for volunteers in the spring.
Having the wonderful BrumSciComm STEM ambassadors at CoCoMAD for the last couple of years has added a whole new dimension. ‘Hands on science’ as part of the festival meets our aims to provide new experiences for the local community in a friendly and familiar environment.
I had a really great time at CoCoMad with the different Chemistry experiments. I thought it was an excellent way to get the public engaged with Chemistry and it fitted in nicely into a local community festival.
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