Big Bang Fair!

Do you remember last year I went to an awesome science show called the Big Bang Fair? Well I went to it again yesterday! Me, my mom and my dad stayed there for 5 hours, and there was so much to do. There was still stuff we didn't see! It was very, very busy, so we couldn't really do a lot of things because of the seemingly endless queues.

One of the first things we saw was a massive, jet powered car! It was called the Bloodhound SSC. The engineers are still working on it and by 2017, the Bloodhound will be able to go over 1000 miles per hour! Now that's really fast. 

There was also a Formula 1 racing car. It was a proper F1 car but it had been turned into a simulator game. It looked really awesome and dad was dying to play it, but unfortunately it was fully booked. Maybe next year.



Trying to land safely!

Later on we saw a show that was about special effects: The "Hollywood Special Effects Show" It was very noisy! It was more comedy than educational but I definitely learnt a lot. Did you know that in the movie "Pyscho" the blood was actually chocolate syrup? Of course when movies started being made in colour they had to find something that was actually blood coloured. Chocolate syrup is not very scary!
I learned how you made explosions and gun-shots look real. There were lots of flames, explosions and bangs.
The scientists explained how CGI (computer generated imagery) works and how you can create creatures or characters and give them human chacteristics. You can make their movements realistic, believable and life-like. One of the men dressed in a special suit that had, what looked like Ping-Pong balls, pinned to it. When the man moved, the computer detected the movement of the balls and transferred the movement to an image of a cartoon character on a huge screen. Awesome, right?

Near the end of the day we saw a rather interesting machine that looked like an oversized treadmill. The treadmill was attached to a special camera that tracked your every move and sent the information to a computer. The scientists there told me to walk up the treadmill at normal speed, then down again but slowly and then walk very quickly back up it! The machine tracked the movements of my feet and legs and plotted them on a line graph. It looked just like a lot of swiggly lines to me, but apparently I was contributing to science! The scientists have found that in all adults, the walking patterns on the graphs are very similar, but in children they are different. They don't know if this is because children are shorter or just because children have a different way of walking. The scientists are collecting lots of data so they can find out the answer. Dad and I had to give our shoe size, and have our legs measured. I was worried because one of my legs was a whole 2cms shorter than the other! The lady said it was completely normal. Phew!! The information the scientists find out will help them to make better prosthetic limbs for children.

Trying to walk "normally"!

The most weird and funny thing there was definitely the robot! It looked a bit creepy because the eyes were really glowing and staring but he was so life-like! It was easy to think he was human and people were having conversations with him. There was a bunch of children taking selfies with him and the robot was saying, " Put your arm around me!" and  "Cheese"! It was really awesome.

There was a man who gave us a talk about "Monster Munch." Who knew crisps could be educational! He showed us how scientists and engineers designed the machinery to produce monster munch from corn. Do you know if you lined up all the Monster Munch produced in just one just day, in one factory, they would reach all the way from London to Edinburgh!

Learning about Nuclear Energy!

I made a friend!

Even though I did really enjoy the day, I think it would have been better if there were less people. It was so busy there was a lot of things that I wanted to do but couldn't because of the queues!