Science festival

These public engagement events can be varied, including lectures, exhibitions, workshops, live demonstrations of experiments, guided tours, and panel discussions.

Even so, the city put resources behind the idea, appointing a director and project team, and in April 1989 the first Edinburgh International Science Festival took place.

[8] Additionally, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science includes a number of public events.

On the other end of the scale, the 2006 British Association Festival of Science held on September 2–9 in Norwich, England, was attended by more than 174,000 visitors.

[4] Because of this, science festivals have high amounts of volunteering scientists, university students, technologists and engineers.

For instance, the 2007 Edinburgh festival "Big Ideas" series included talks on what makes racing cars fast, the molecular basis of food preparation, the neurobiology of love and beauty, and the properties of quarks.

The 'second order' of public engagement describes two-way 'dialogue', where both experts and laypeople can learn from each other by exchanging knowledge and valuable information.

The strengths of science festivals lie in their unique role of creating strong and memorable impressions due to their time-limited nature and the variety of different engagement forms.

This enables visitors to dive deeper into science, benefitting from their immediacy and interactivity, while scientists get the chance to enthuse them about their work and connect to a non-expert audience.

In addition, festivals are often perceived to be more open and honest about uncertainties in the nature of scientific processes compared to the 'ready made' contents from some public relations end of science engagement.

[19] Jensen and Kennedy suggest that science festivals face challenges in terms of reaching out to as wide a public as possible, being much more inclusive to the actual population.