Science Alive’s main event at the Wayville Showgrounds, spread over three days, kept us very busy. The first day was exclusively school students, and we spent a lot of time with mainly high-school students demonstrating our scanning electron microscopes and discussing possibilities for using them in year 11 and 12 research projects.

The following two days were very busy, with hundreds of kids getting hands on experience with both our SEMs and the Olympus optical microscopes we had set up. Having a spider in one of the optical microscopes kept us entertained.

We estimate 20,000 people attended the event, and around 750 people stopped by and got hands-on with our scanning electron microscopes.

The next Science Alive event will be held in Mt. Gambier on the 22nd of September, 2018.

Image: Fly @ 150x, taken by Jordan Ritchie