From outer space to playing brass instruments, there's lots of exciting things for kids at the Great Exhibition Road Festival.
The Festival, a free three-day celebration of curiosity, discovery and exploration in South Kensington, is certainly not just for grown-ups!
The Curiosity Zone, created especially for families, is all about hands-on science, exciting demos and brilliant experiments.
Set amongst the beautiful greenery of Princes Gardens, the Curiosity Zone featured many exhibits to excite and inspire the next generation of scientists.
Kids learned about the Coanda Effect from Fluid Dynamics researchers and students, which is the tendency of a fluid, such as a gas or liquid, to stay attached to a nearby surface. Demonstrations showed beach balls and table tennis balls appear to be magically floating in the air.
Our younger visitors learnt about the excavation of stegosaurus bones with a helping hand from staff from the Natural History Museum. Kids could play with a wooden model of a stegosaurus skeleton to see which bones go where.
Department of Materials staff and students were on hand to teach festival-goers about genius materials – materials that don't behave in the same way as normal materials. With one material kids could make their own bracelets.
At the Space Zone, there was much to be explored for budding astronauts. The warm weather didn't put children off dressing up as astronauts. They could also get an out of this world experience making moon magnets to take home with them.
And it wasn't just science on offer. The Royal College of Music taught whole families to play brass instruments through 20 minute workshops. The aim was that by the end of the workshop kids could play like James Brown's horn section!
This year's Festival, set to be the biggest yet, brings together more than twenty institutions in and around South Kensington for the first time, including Imperial College London, the Royal Commission of 1851, Royal Albert Hall, V&A, Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.
