EPCC at Edinburgh Science Festival 2026

Supercomputing for all ages

Can you think like a supercomputer scientist? Our stand at Edinburgh Science Festival will include three activity stations teaching you all about supercomputers and how they work. 

Supercomputers are impacting an ever-growing part of our lives, from weather forecasting to engineering and, more recently, the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). Come and learn how to think like a supercomputer and how processors make decisions. Visitors can also have a go at training your own AI model.

To help you think like a computer, we will have a hands-on activity where you will work in pairs to first create a maze out of Lego, and then create instructions for others to solve the maze. 

For the inner workings of computers, we will be bringing our "Spintronics" mechanical circuit kits, where you can create working logic circuits, which form the basis of all computer processors. 

Our third activity introduces you to AI! Using micro:bit computers, you can train your own AI agent to recognise different movements such as clapping, waving or jumping. This will help you understand just how AI is trained on real data... and its limitations! 

All of our activities are hands-on and open to a range of ages. We will also have free postcards with examples of real research enabled using the UK's current national supercomputer ARCHER2.

Find us at  University of Edinburgh: 7 Days, 100 Scientists, from Saturday 11–Monday 13 April 2026 at Stratosphere, Dynamic Earth.