The Nottingham Festival of Science and Curiosity will be back again Monday 5 – Friday 16 February 2024 for its ninth edition. The festival is produced by local charity Ignite!, and is a collaboration between UoN, NTU, local authorities across Nottinghamshire and cultural and educational organisations.
We are currently developing plans for the 2024 festival that include a range of activities, focusing on work with schools and in-person events across the county. We are now keen to hear from academics and researchers, staff and students from all disciplines, cultural backgrounds and career stages who are interested in taking part.
The first week of the festival is when we run our Schools Programme, taking activities into schools and providing opportunities for pupils to visit activities off-site too.
We already have lots of schools across the county signed up to take part in activities so we’re looking for people who’d like to run a workshops, deliver presentations or work with pupils to do research projects in primary, secondary, college or alternative provision settings.
The weekend and second week of the festival is when we run our Public Events Programme, where we take activities out into community settings across the county.
We programme smaller workshops as well as bigger drop-in events, so we’re flexible on the kinds of activities we’d like to see, whether you have a more developed workshop that you’d like to target at a specific audience or if you have a simple quick activity they can be one amongst many at a larger event.
We may also invite researchers to pair up with community groups as part of our Community Grants programme if we think there’s alignment. Venues for these events include libraries, museums and other community spaces right across the county from Nottingham to Mansfield, Worksop to Stapleford, and we will be able to support contributors with travel expenses to reach all of these audiences.
The festival Magazine targets children aged 9-11 and is distributed through schools, foodbanks and community organizations.
We are looking for short articles, puzzles, quizzes, and suggestions for activities or experiments to do at home.
The contributions will be reviewed by Year 7 pupils before going to print so you’ll get some great feedback on how to reach the target audience. Our team of graphic design students will be happy to work with you on illustrations, graphics and layout. There’s more information about the magazine on our website. https://nottsfosac.co.uk/2024-festival/
Get in touch Please register your interest through this form. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSffVwVoabbVJss6uapkTXVGU3Y-QXzmP19IVnP1UnV4vtySyQ/viewform?usp=send_form
The deadline is 3 November 2023. We like to work closely with each contributor so that you’re reaching the audiences you want to and so that the quality of the activities we deliver through the festival are of the highest standard.
We’ll have a read through your submission and then arrange a meeting with you to discuss your ideas in more detail and work out how your activity can fit into the festival programme this year.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you! To keep up to date with all things FOSAC, follow us on social media @NottsFOSAC
Independent Councillor Richard MacRae 