Submitted by D.P. Juan on Wed, 03/04/2024 - 15:51
From the 23rd - 24th of March, we returned to the Cambridge Festival! Our team had an intense weekend running our stall and engaging with families on drug discovery topics.
The Cambridge Festival is an annual event coordinated by the University of Cambridge’s Public Engagement team. It is a multi-disciplinary festival with a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening in Cambridge. The Festival combines many departments, institutions and groups within and outside the University.
We ran four activities under our "Poisions to Medicines" theme. The aim was to encourage an understanding of where many of our drugs come from - and to introduce people to the drug discovery process.
Our first activity was colouring sheets. We commissioned an artist to draw new colouring sheets, to give younger children a simple but fun Pharamcology activity.
Our second activity was our matching game! This game was rewritten to be more accessible to children. This was our keystone activity, to reinforce our core message. It prompted a lot of conversations with families about where our medicines come from!
Our third activity involved our 3D printer. We spent a lot of time creating various proteins, drugs, animal, and plant models. These models linked to our matching game, to help visualise our matching game. Look out for our write-up on how we did it - coming soon!
Finally, we ran our SimHeart demo for the first time at the Festival! This used our SimHeart software, which we use to teach our undergraduates, to let families play around with drugs and compounds. By doing so, they were able to see first-hand the impacts that some of our cardiac-focused medicines and compounds may have on the heart.
Thank you to our volunteers over the weekend! Without you, this would not have been possible: Olabimpe Olayinka, Aida Ashrafzadeh, Maria Marti-Solano, Onyeka Awunor, Christine Roberts, Luisa Capalbo, Pam Rowling Maria Zacharopoulou, Tony Lim, Janet Kumita, Milena Malcharek, Lasya Vankayala, Michelle Meng, Andrzej Harris.
