TMAF-funded PhD researcher Louisa Moor reports on the show she put on at this year’s Norwich Science Festival. It includes inspirational talks, shows, exhibitions and an abundance of hands-on activities, with a particular focus on exciting children about science. This year, soil science was on the scene.
“I was delighted to share my scientific research with young people. A new addition to Norwich Science Festival (NSF) in 2025 was a series of immersive, theatrical sets for children in a workshop format run across the whole week of the festival.
Sharing science through playful activity
The workshops were developed by NSF producer Claire Mutimer, science communicator and author Dr Mandy Hartley (The Little Story Telling Company), and scientist and STEM ambassador Dr. Lucy Catto. The workshop facilitators trained a diversity of workshop ‘explainers’ from a wide range of STEM, teaching, and arts backgrounds to facilitate the workshops across the week of the festival.
Thanks to the funding and backing from TMAF, a workshop was designed exploring soil health, agriculture, and ways of assessing life in the soil to engage 7 to 11-year-old children with farming at NSF. It was one of four workshops running across the week: ‘Wondertots’, ‘Making Rainbows’, ‘Light up the City’ and the TMAF-supported ‘Harvest Heroes’.
How to be heroes solving a farmer’s problem
The Harvest Heroes workshop was loosely based on my TMAF-funded PhD research investigating soil health, with a particular focus on soil biology in agricultural systems. To reflect this, Dr Mandy Hartley set up a workshop where a potato farmer (played as Patrick Mutimer) was having problems with his yield because of his farm’s soil health. From this, we followed a story where the children were our ‘soil scientists’ helping us to figure out farmer Patrick’s problem.
The theatre set was split into 2 parts, with the first side an immersive underground set with soil life and potatoes coming out of the walls and ceiling and a miniature farm set-up. The second side was set up as a lab with microscopes, where the children could help investigate soil properties. After the children helped us figure out the soil properties and nutrient levels, we asked them to help us test the soil ‘DNA’ with Lego blocks that were run through a ‘Blocksford Brickopore’ Lego DNA sequencer from the Earlham Institute.
From this the children could try to find the organisms that matched their Lego DNA sequence, something they really engaged with. To wrap up the workshop we asked the children to choose from a series of solutions that farmer Patrick could implement on his farm (e.g. planting wild borders, applying fertiliser, cover cropping) and we figured out whether he would make a profit from this.
Was the workshop a success?
We had positive feedback from children and adults about this workshop, with lots of parents commenting that it was nice to see their kids involved with hands-on scientific experience.
As a workshop facilitator I had an amazing time, worked with a lovely team and was grateful for all the support from Claire, Mandy and Lucy across the week.
I truly believe we have created a bunch of Harvest Heroes, who may want to become farmers or soil scientists when they grow up!”
