Centre for Trials Research at the Cardiff Science Festival “Be a Scientist” Event

Cardiff Science Festival

Be a Scientist

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Linda Adara, Sarah Rawlinson, Kim Munnery, Kelly Lewis, Dolce Advani, Ceri Fayne, Nuria Marquez Almuina

In celebration of this year’s Cardiff Science Festival, events were held across Wales’ capital between 22nd February and 2nd March 2025 to inspire and educate. Cardiff University staff, students, and volunteers brought the festival to life with exciting events popping up across Cardiff, giving visitors the opportunity to uncover the science of everyday life.

We are a team of research support co-ordinators, data managers, and trial managers representing the Centre for Trials Research (CTR), Cardiff University at the ‘Be a Scientist!’ event.

We saw 506 people attend over the course of the day, with people arriving from all over South Wales to explore our research and the variety of ways the sciences support life, health, and wellbeing.

We set up an interactive stand with ‘have a go’ activities and experiments for young children aged six and upwards to experience what being a scientist is really like and talked to visitors about medical trials.

Through narrative storytelling and posters, children met Geoffrey Giraffe with a broken tail and learnt that he is taking part in a medical trial of a new super bandage to see if it works. 139 young children were interested in our work and participated in Geoffrey’s trial, learning the concepts of hypothesising, randomising, experimentation, data analysis, and results at each stage of the journey.

After hypothesising if the super bandage will fix Geoffrey’s tail, children moved to the randomisation station where they could choose a coloured token or spin an e-wheel to join the intervention or control group. We found that the e-wheel was the most popular randomisation activity with 95 participants and 44 for the coloured tokens. Next, they received treatment, painting an experimental bandage which was coated in wax or holding a prepared bandage under a UV light to reveal if it had worked. Both experiments were equally popular, and children were very excited to know if the tail was fixed or still broken. Children then moved to our data analysis station where they built graphs and 3-D datasets of Geoffrey’s healing with Lego blocks. Finally, children completed their learning journey by displaying their experiment results on our display board and the team revealed which group they had joined and how their results helped scientists know which treatments to recommend to doctors and nurses.

Children gave us positive feedback when engaging with each of the stations:

‘I hypothesise that there is a bone broken.’

‘I can say randomisation.’

‘The treatment worked!’

‘We did a building calculator.’

‘The fixed bone is winning!’

Adult visitors were impressed with our stand and ability to engage young children by turning complex ideas into fun and playful activities:

‘They are having a great time exploring.’

‘My little one really enjoyed taking part in this stall. It was well pitched and a fun way to explain randomisation, especially for little ones, it wasn’t made overly complicated to understand.’

‘The Lego really brings the data analysis to life.’

Every participant was given a CTR gift and handout with reminders of the activities, information about trials science, and examples of how data can be used in healthcare research.

The team agreed that the event gave us a unique opportunity to share our work at CTR with new audiences and that taking part helped us to see our research from a new perspective and think creatively, generating innovative ideas to engage younger participants. We are proud to inspire the next generation of scientific researchers!