As a part of my work experience week with Ignite! I had the chance to visit Colwick Woods along with a guide from the community of that area who helped us identify the different features of the woods.

The visit to Colwick Woods had been my first time visiting a woodland area and actually getting the chance to indulge in it and discover the different parts of it. We started off our walk by going down what used to be the old track for carriages and horses which had now become barely visible as more green grew around it.

We had the chance to wonder off track midway through our walk and climbed up smaller rocks and through trees. I found it much more exciting and thrilling going off the path and walking through the trees as it made me feel as if I were in a jungle.

As we had a guide talking to us about the area and we learned many new things about the woodland. We saw tracks of animals into trees and were able to identify what type of animal it would be based on the track it left behind. We saw the old trees and were told that some of them were there since the 19th century and had not fallen down.

During our walk we came across an old 'ice house' which was the equivalent of a modern day fridge used centuries ago to preserve foods and other things. The ice house was almost like a well and very deep - the bottom would have been filled with ice and straw and covered with a cone-shaped ceiling.

Overall my visit there was very informative and unforgettable!

Thanks for reading!

Hello there!

My name is Dalia Ahmed and I am one of the ‘ChemSparks’. My project investigates the relevance of wooden rollercoasters over time. Our central divergent question is ‘why are wooden rollercoasters still built today?’. This question helps us narrow down what we want to look at.

As part of this journey, we were given the opportunity to visit UCL’s annual ‘Festival of Stuff’. This included several activities, all housed in a small courtyard. The activities included: mini golf, making your own visor and a wide variety of demonstrations and experiments.

The mini golf course included many scientific discoveries and principles that were all explained to us by the students who guided us through the rules. The course incorporated principles such as; black holes, microscopes, flat Earth and many more (all were great fun!) Even though I can’t play very well, I thoroughly enjoyed it and as a reward for finishing the course, I was given a Marimo moss ball (I named him Scruffy), which I am determined to keep alive!

They had a broad range of demonstrations and experiments which covered very difficult subject matter but was presented in a fun and light-hearted way. The experiments included; making your own bouncy ball, pencil and super-absorbent polymer (also known as Orbeez!), which many of us still have today.

Overall, if I were to sum up my time at the festival in one sentence it would be “an educational experience like no other”. I would highly recommend this amazing to everyone and anyone.

Goodbye, thanks for reading!

I’ve just returned from a fascinating weekend in Germany, at the Falling Walls Community Meeting and the Silbersalz Science and Media Festival!

I was invited because we’d put in an application to present the project we did with the Refugee Forum at the St Ann’s Allotments at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin last year. We weren’t successful, but Falling Walls want to create a community of people who work in science engagement, and so invited people who hadn’t been successful to come to Halle as part of the Silberzalz Festival. It was a great opportunity to meet people from organisations across Europe and the world who run projects that aim to break down barriers between science and society. There were people from Brazil, Uzbekistan, India, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK and it was really interesting to take part in discussions about sustainability, impact, engaging new audiences and other issues we all face together!

Then on the Saturday, it was the Silberzalz conference, and it was all based on the ‘Science of Love’. There were some fascinating talks and panel discussions interrogating ‘Are we programmed by nature for Love?’, ‘Is our Love constructed by Society?’ and ‘Can we design a better future with and for Love?’. We were shown some clips from films, including ‘Sleepless in New York’ about the neuroscience of a lovesickness and ‘The Serengeti Rules’ about the work of ecologists, which were particularly profound. I’m interested in exploring how we might be able to show them as part of next year’s Festival of Science and Curiosity!

Many thanks to the Robert Bosch Stiftung for supporting this opportunity, and thanks to Falling Walls for inviting me.

We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with BioCity, the UK's largest bioscience innovation and incubation centre, based right here in Nottingham.

We're going to be developing Lab_13 BioCity, a programme working with primary schools across Nottingham, where pupils will have the opportunity to spend a day in one of the BioCity labs, working with scientists to investigate burning questions that they've chosen themselves. This is an adaptation of our Lab_13 model, which started in 2009 and has since spread across three Nottingham schools, one in Northamptonshire, one in London, three in Ghana and one in Finland.

We ran the first Lab_13 BioCity in May, and began by inviting pupils from Henry Whipple Primary School to put forward questions for investigation a few weeks in advance of their trip at BioCity. They came up with 'What's the biggest fossil found?', 'Why does our breath smell in the morning?', 'Can medicines come from plants?' and 'What if we had no air?'. We worked with our Scientist in Residence for the day, Dr Janine Swarbrick from HGF, an intellectual property firm based in BioCity, to put together a series of activities that stemmed from the pupils' questions. These included looking at fossils lent to us by Wollaton Hall, investigating the claims made by herbal teas and building an experiment testing germs on their bodies.

We've got a date lined up with Rufford Primary in June but we're looking for schools who are interested in the July, September, October and November slots. We can be flexible about dates, and the only thing the pupils need to come armed with is plenty of curiosity and an appetite for investigation. If your school is interested, get in touch with Megan Shore (megan@ignitefutures.org.uk).

Lab_13 BioCity is only one project in our partnership with BioCity - we'll also be running a girls-only event for secondary pupils in October to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, and delivering science communication and public engagement training for scientists based at BioCity companies.

At the beginning of the year, we worked with a group of young people from the Transition Youth Group at the Ridge Centre in Bestwood, Nottingham North. The project was funded by the #IWillcampaign,which encourages young people to take part in social action, and we looked at this through the lens of creativity and curiosity.

In the first few weeks, we spent some time brainstorming with the young people to see what kinds of things they were interested in and there were lots of ideas! In the end, it was decided that we should make a project that is an innovative way of solving an existing problem, and if possible it should relate to Food, Growing and Sustainability.

Mo (our resident environmental biologist) came up with the idea of trying out growing mycelium and using it as a building material and everyone thought it was a fun idea to try out, especially once we found out that mycelium is the underground part of mushrooms! The young people decided that they wanted to build a miniature model of the Ridge (their youth club building) using the mycelium, so that's what we did.

Each week we took the next step in growing the mycelium, one week pressure-cooking plastic bags filled with sawdust and the next wrapping wooden blocks with sellotape. There were lots of strange smells along the way... We also worked with video-maker Isabelle Halliday to capture the process; the young people scripted, directed and starred in the videos, which can be found online. Below is the first of the five videos explaining the project.