The appliance of science - Scottish children enthused by festival

The Edinburgh Science Festival has been a mainstay of the event calendar in the Scottish capital for 35 years. 

Taking over venues across the city, it's a chance for young and old to look at science with fresh eyes. And it's certainly popular.  

Children play with shadow puppets to learn about light, they marvel at the displays in the Space section, touch meteorites, watch interactive videos and say hello to Dolly the Sheep whose body - and scientific significance - is stuffed and preserved forever.

James Garvock is one of the festival's science communicators whose job it is to enthuse a love of science into the young event goers.  

"We can get kids as young as five, maybe even younger," he tells me. "And we can start to give them a route into science and scientific concepts and ideas that aren't scary and they don't seem too confusing."

The theme of this year's event is Going Global. Organizers say that scientific discoveries are never normally made in isolation. They're the result of collaboration and communication, often between countries and continents. Discovery, they say, is carried forward by many hands.

Hassun El-Zafar is the Director of Edinburgh Science Festival. His enthusiasm and commitment to making science accessible to all is palpable.

"What we wanted to really explore, was how science has always been a global story," El-Zafar says, "a rich tapestry spreading across continents and centuries, whether that was the trade route from China to Europe or whether that's what we're seeing today with research communities working with each other across borders to solve global challenges."

One of the global challenges – the rise in artificial intelligence. El-Zafar is adamant, the rise in AI doesn’t have to be scary.

"The only way that we're going to make informed decisions about what we do with this technology, is making the public aware and understanding of what that technology is and enabling researchers and industry who are engaging with that technology, to have the opportunity to share their findings with the general public."

The concepts at the Science Festival are huge and disparate, with events covering the whole gamut of science; from IT and coding, to nature and our oceans. 

Students from the University of Edinburgh's Dance Science course offered up a piece of choreography that explores the impact of overfishing. With original music and a cultural blend of dance styles that kept an audience spellbound, the piece is the work of choreographer Madeline Squire, Artist in Residence at Moray House. 

Unusually, this year every student on the course is from China. For Square, this wasn't just a chance to learn about different cultures, it was an opportunity to discover other dance styles too, classic Chinese moves blended seamlessly with Western dances.

"The main thing I've learned about China is that they're so respectful," says Square. "There's such a beautiful elegance and the discipline from the students has been amazing."

It's unusual for an entire cohort to come from one country. Dr Wendy Timmons, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who designed the Dance Science course, is proud of this year’s students.

"We've up to 40 students this year, all from China," she says. "But China is a big place and they're all different. They bring different representations of dance to the program."

Student Yu Zhengliang agrees. "We're all from different parts of China but we all have different backgrounds, we all have different cultures and sometimes there are things, when we talk to each other, we find out 'Oh so we do things differently in our lives.'"

It's that unique character that makes this festival so enduring. A fusion, not just of ideas, but cultures too. And out of that fusion, it’s hoped, come the scientists of the future.