Dr Edgard Camaros I Perez recently won funding to present a booth at the Science if Wonderful! outreach event in Brussels, hosted by the EU Commission, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. Edgard very kindly invited me along to join him and help host the booth. The event was wonderful! 4000 schoolkids from across Europe attended and had the chance to talk to scientists about different types of science and careers, ranging from physics to chemistry to archaeology to biomechanics to plant science, and of course everything in between!
Our booth was titled “Virtual Stories of our Human Evolution”. We brought along some 3D printed skulls and chatted to the students about how these individuals died and how attitudes towards the dead have changed throughout our evolution! We also brought the Arctec Spyder Laser Scanner along to demonstrate how we can create 3D models of fossils in the field and what we can do with those 3D models afterwards! As you can guess, the scanning was popular!!
Amazingly, we were also asked to present in the cinema – which was this wonderful room (see photo below) where students could come along to learn about a particular topic in more detail for 30 minutes. We chatted about fieldwork, data collection, virtual methods of scanning, where to find fossils and what to do with them once found. There was also a short segment that I presented on modelling movement in a fossil – how do we reconstruct muscles, how can we make a model move and also a bit about simulation training/interations to produce a working simulation that reflects reality – this of course involved many blooper reels of human simulations falling over, which the kids loved! It was a challenge to talk about this to an age group of 12-18, but I think Edgard and I nailed it! The cinema ended with us 3D scanning a kid wearing a monkey mask, much to the delight of the kid and all his friends! Many kids were filming this on their mobile phones, so I’m sure this exists on the internet somewhere!
The Walking Hominins 