Muddy boots, leaking tents, and a home-made power station firing ping-pong balls at delighted festival goers as the heavens
opened somewhere deep in the Welsh Black Mountains - this was public engagement
at its most extreme!
It all started very sedately around a warm
and dry meeting table where PhD students from the Doctoral Training Centre in
Low Carbon Technologies at the University of Leeds as well as representatives
from the University of Bristol and University College London learned of RCUK’s
plan to fund an ambitious public engagement project with the theme of Energy at
the Green Man music festival in Wales.
This unleashed a flurry of activity as
the PhD researchers brainstormed ideas ranging from radioactive bananas to
solar powered car racing, all with one aim in mind - to get people thinking and
talking about where our future energy supplies will come from.
Einstein's garden
With a well established area for the fusion
of science, art and nature, known as Einstein’s Garden, the Green Man Festival
was ideally suited to the project, dubbed the Energy Factory. The overall
concept was to give festival goers, many of them families with children, an
experience of a range of low carbon energy technologies through games and fun
activities.
The students manned six separate energy satellites, (solar, wind,
nuclear, carbon capture, hydrogen and microbial fuel cells), all linked
together by a central hub where after completing all the activities, festival
goers could vote on thought provoking questions such as, ‘Which technology
should be prioritised?’, and ‘Which would you prefer in your back yard?’.
The excitement builds
The concept worked brilliantly, with hordes
of excited children and adults alike, making their way around the satellites to
collect their hand stamps, proof that they had taken part in the activity. Some
even took great effort to memorise the facts they had learned just in case the
stamps washed off in the continuous heavy rain.
After completing the Energy
Factory activities and casting their votes, they were rewarded with their very
own Energy rosette. Of course, you cannot please everyone all of the time, as
was demonstrated by the four year old
girl dressed in a green fairy suit who burst into tears when she was told that
she had already had her turn with the nuclear waste grabbers and she would have
to give them to someone else.
For all those involved in the Energy
Factory it was both a huge effort and a huge reward. To communicate the essence
of one’s research in fun and imaginative ways to children and adults
simultaneously is not an easy task. However,
the well-used voting board was evidence enough that the engagement and debate
it generates is worth the effort.
Read more about the Energy Factory here.
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