Submitted by D.P. Juan on Fri, 17/04/2026 - 10:50
From the 27th - 28th of March, we returned to the Cambridge Festival! Our team had an intense weekend running our new activities and engaging with curious families and children.
The Cambridge Festival is an annual event coordinated by the University of Cambridge’s Public Engagement team. It is a multidisciplinary festival with a mix of online, on-demand, and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening in Cambridge. The Festival brings together many departments, institutions, and groups within and outside the University.
We ran four activities under our "Behind the Medicines: Get Hands-on with the Department of Pharmacology" theme. The aim was to encourage an understanding of the biological concepts underpinning the research of selected lab groups- and to promote families to think deeper about how new medicines are developed.
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 stem cell differentiation plink game! This was our keystone activity, aiming to roughly simulate the developmental pathways of stem cells.
Our third activity was our antibody-antigen matching game. These models were 3D printed and sourced from Yale University's School of Medicine. The goal was to introduce families to the concepts underpinning immunity.
Finally, we ran our SimHeart demo. 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.
