EPCC at the Edinburgh Science Festival 2026
17 April 2026
EPCC PhD student Sam Jackson was among our team at this year's Festival. He writes about his experience as a first-time volunteer on the EPCC booth.
During my first year as a PhD student at EPCC, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to volunteer at this year's Edinburgh Science Festival (ESF). The theme was Going Global, highlighting the international collaborative effort that helps us push our understanding of science forwards. EPCC hosted its own booth within Dynamic Earth, alongside other Schools of the University of Edinburgh.
With three key displays for children and parents to interact with, I had the opportunity to discuss the work at EPCC whilst talking to the public about key concepts and ideas that we explore at EPCC. This was an interesting experience for me too, as I used to attend the ESF as a child and it is where I first tried programming microcontrollers, so it was wonderful to return and give back as an adult.
Our activities
Our three primary activities were:
- Spintronics: using chains and gears to emulate binary with basic logic gates
- AI: using machine learning to train a micro:bit to detect and classify hand movements
- Lego maze: working in pairs to build a maze and blindly recreate it.
Spintronics
Spintronics was persistently popular throughout the day. Participants really enjoyed building complex chain-linked systems and this gave us the opportunity to teach the them about AND and OR logic gates. It was a complicated station to hold down but I managed to have great conversations and link the Spintronics back to real-world examples in everyday life.
AI activity
The AI booth was really enjoyable for children and adults alike. Where children took the opportunity to train the model and try to trick the micro:bit, the parents were interested in understanding the underlying ideas and how they relate to the AI that they see in models like ChatGPT. The micro:bit taught both parents and children about the importance of good data and also the sheer quantity of data that EPCC and ARCHER2, the UK National Supercomputer, work with each day.
Lego maze
Finally, the lego maze was hugely popular with the youngest children who developed shared vocabularies, whilst unable to see their partner's maze, and recreated a route through their maze similar to a co-operative battleship game. Although, understandably, some kids decided to just start playing with the lego.
Favourite interactions
I also spent some time staffing our ARCHER2 desk and was fortunate to have some great discussions with the public. Whether it was explaining the components of one of ARCHER2's motherboards or how ARCHER2 helps optimise renewable energy generated from a wind turbine farm, our visitors were interested and keen to engage in further conversations. I spoke to children who were interested in why their phone gets hot playing games, teenagers keen to emulate some of our physical simulations, and adults curious about the computer networking and environmental impact of ARCHER2.
Success of the ESF
It was incredible to see such a large turnout from the public and enthusiastic volunteers, and I am grateful to all the adults and children who shared their time with us. A big thank you to the rest of the EPCC team who helped me get involved, as well as Dynamic Earth for hosting us for the 2026 ESF.
Author
Sam Jackson