EPCC at Edinburgh Science Festival 2026

Intro

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. The theme of the science festival was Going Global, highlighting the international collaborative effort that helps us push our understanding of science forwards. EPCC held 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 opporunity to discuss the work at EPCC whilst talking to the public about key concepts and ideas that we try to explore at Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre.

Our Booths

Our three primary booths were focused on:

1. Lego Maze - working in pairs to build a maze and blindly recreate it
2. Spintronics - using chains and gears to emulate binary with basic logic gates.
3. AI - using Machine Learning to train a microbit to detect and classify hand movements

Throughout the day, these booths would vary in popularity but spintronics was persistenly popular. Beyond making the basic logic gates, the public really enjoyed building complex chain-linked systems. Meanwhile, the AI booth was really enjoyable for the children and adults-alike. Where kids got the opportunity to train the model and try to trick the microbit, the parents were interested in understanding the underlying ideas and how it relates to the AI that they see nowadays in models like ChatGPT. Finally, the lego maze was hugely popular with the youngest children. I got to watch the kids develop shared vocabularies whilst unable to see their partner’s maze and recreate a route through their maze, similar to a co-operative battleships. Although, I did appreciate that some kids decided to, understandably, just start playing with the lego.

Favourite Interactions with the public

Whilst away from the primary booths, I also spent some time manning our Archer2 desk. With the opportunity to discuss what work is done with the UK’s National Supercomputer, I 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 is used to help optimise renewable energy generated from a wind turbine farm, the public was interested and keen to engage in further conversations. I got to talk with children 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 our Supercomputer.

Other Booths and General Success of ESF

Alongside EPCC, other schools of University of Edinburgh were holding their own booths. The School of Engineering had a hugely popular exhibition focused on cavitation bubbles, with a great demonstration involving an expanding balloon within a water tank whilst the School of Informatics had some cool displays on identifying deepfake content. Overall, it was incredible to see such a large turnout from the public and excited volunteers and I am grateful for 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.