Our mission is to enhance the Future Generations’ educational and career journeys, to help address under-representations in education, and to enrich the general public’s “Science Capital” by feeding their innate appetite for the “wow” factor of science.
We launched our first community-engagement project in September 2016 with a pop-up science exhibition in Swansea’s city centre, which welcomed 16,000 members of the public and 1,000 students during its 100 opening days. Since this highly successful start, we have run or been involved with over 100 activities and events engaging with over 100,000 people.
These one-off events have included community activities in Castle Square in the centre of Swansea, school workshops, interactive talks in libraries, community halls, the Swansea Prison, museums and regional science festivals, exhibitions in museums and art galleries, and large-scale annual exhibitions with several thousand daily visitors which we curate in Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum.
The success of the pop-up exhibition, and the community’s enthusiastic support of our subsequent activities and events has inspired us to launch a long term venue, now open in Swansea’s city centre. Further funding continues to be sought to transition this second pop-up venue into a long-term home for Oriel Science.