Mario won the Cells Zone in June 2013, and won £500 to spend on a science communication project. Let’s take a look at where the prize money has gone.

Kids and parents arriving at the tent

Winning I’m a Scientist last June was a complete surprise, but also a great opportunity for me and my friends at Cosy Science to make the pilot activity of our Science club idea a reality. Cosy Science is a monthly Science café in which a top scientist speaks during 30 minutes about a hot scientific topic in the friendly atmosphere of a pub. The audience, a mixture of scientists and non-scientists, are encouraged to ask questions afterwards, creating a two-ways dialogue between the speaker and the attendees.

Due to their format, the Cosy Science talks are for adults only. We wanted to try and create something different for kids, and that’s why we came with the idea of the CoSci Club! The CoSci (Cosy Science) Club aims to be a series of workshops for school students — key stage 2/3 — in which they will learn and experiment about certain topics such as Evolution, Cell Biology or the Human Body. For our pilot activity of the Club, we had the opportunity to be involved in the Bloomsbury Festival, an annual festival of Art, Music and Science happening in the streets of Bloomsbury, in London.

Two girls trying to decide which man was the tallest in the picture

No one was able to shake my hand at the first attempt wearing the reversing goggles!

A little tigress looking for the right answers of our quiz

The activity, The sense-sational world of human senses, took place in the Francis Crick Institute tent of the festival hub, in Russell Square. As the name suggests, everything was focused on how the human senses work and how they can be deceived! Kids (and no-so kids too!) were able to see the world upside-down wearing a pair of reversing goggles; they were tricked looking at optical illusions; they tried to guess what was inside our mysterious boxes by smelling through the holes, and also the food stuck to the bottom of another big box by touching it blindfolded; they created some music with the wine-water glasses too, and struggled to speak on a microphone while listening to their own distorted voice!

Apart from all the fun experiments, we proposed to the kids a game in which they had to choose the correct answer for five questions related to curious facts about the senses. They had the aid of a series of posters distributed throughout the experiment tables, so they also needed to search for the right answers! The lucky winner of the game received a family ticket to the London Zoo.

The overall experience was a success: the kids loved all the experiments, we had a lot of fun interacting with them plus everyone else who came to the tent, and we also learnt what kids are interested about and how to challenge and make them think. Hopefully in the near future we will be able to properly set up CoSci Club in a school, or several ones, with more fun activities and experiments!

Thanks to I’m a Scientist for making this real with its generous funding, to everyone who dropped by our tent and play with our experiments, and also to my fantastic colleagues and friends Kinga Bercsenyi, Nathalie Schmieg, Mariana Campos and Alessandra Audia, because without them Cosy Science wouldn’t exist.

From left: Kinga Bercsenyi, Nathalie Schmieg, Mariana Campos and Alessandra Audia, and Mario Ruiz.