I had been trying to make it to every Science Sante by MOSAIC, and when I finally made it to the third one, I realized I had been missing out.
Hello! I'm Hansikaa, a student currently studying in Grade 9. A sentence to summarise myself would be, “someone who narrates 5 stories while trying to talk about one incident”, but I promise I won’t make this long and boring. My relationship with science? You could call me a Science Enthusiast.
Science Sante is a gathering where science communicators, educators, researchers, students, or an enthusiast come together to discuss science, also to be able to learn and share science.
It makes science open, and I find the idea to be extremely appealing.
After the Zine Making, Kitchen Chemistry, Tangrams and the 3D printing stations in the first and second Sante, this time they had something different.
Science Sante #3 was held at the Science Gallery Bengaluru and when you first enter, you meet a jolly dog named Buckminster Manjunath. Then, inside the building you can make your Data Selfie (for DataViz - visualising data by collecting it in the form of pictures) and this time the idea was genuinely so creative and mouthwatering. They called it Oota Viz, and rightly so. The concept was of a thali, where every answer one picked was represented by a sticker of a dish which could be put on a banana leaf. Everybody loved the idea and really enjoyed doing it. (credits to Aditi who said “It was a shower thought”)
I had fun volunteering at the registration desk by helping attendees make their data selfie after they registered. The DataViz had a question, which was “What came first? Egg or Chicken?” it really made me think a lot, and I saw many people racking their brains at it too.
There was this really cute Giveaway Corner with stickers and books for us to take home.
There was also a Book Nook with books from the Science Gallery Bengaluru (SGB) & Paper Crane Lab (PCL). The nook also displayed zines made by participants of the Zine-making Workshop held earlier at PCL, by MOSAIC.
After everyone was settled inside the room, we started with an introduction to MOSAIC by Mathura and Rahul. They talked about the previous Santes and what to expect during the day ahead.
This was followed by a talk by Dr. Shobhana Narasimhan, she spoke about her work in Computational Nanoscience and how the difficulty of solving a two body problem (easy), a three body problem (hard) and a many body problem (impossible) differs.
Following this talk, there were two things happening parallely, which were - unconference sessions under the themes of Quantum Science and Food Science, and a workshop on - The Science of Sourdough Starters.
I took part in the workshop and it was a spectacular experience! It was conducted by Pranav Ullal, the founder of Loafer & Co. He told us what a sourdough starter is, and how bread was traditionally made about 2000 years ago by the Egyptians. We got to experience making and tasting our own flatbread. We topped it with a dollop of butter - it tasted heavenly. We couldn't stop after one bite :)
Then we had a talk by Dr. Priyadarsanan Dharma Rajan, who spoke about how insects could be future food. It was actually a very enlightening session where he made us understand how on an average, a human consumes around 1 pound of insects per year. Insects are found even in day to day substances, from lipsticks to red food coloring (Carmine).
After the talk, we had lunch which consisted of a simple dal, paneer curry with jeera rice, rotis and a salad.
Then, we came back to a brain racking quiz about science by Himadri, with very creative questions such as comic or movie characters being related to science. It was fun and engaging, since we saw a lot of funny answers and scores!
We then had a 3-Minute Thesis Competition, where participants had to come onstage and communicate science in an engaging and understandable manner within three minutes. This was a session where we learnt a lot, not only about science but also how different people share and communicate things. We also had a 6-year old tell us how to identify Pythagorean Triples in three minutes!
Mathura then took some feedback while the judges - Kavya Narayanan, Jagath V and Sai Rahul decided on the winners of the 3-minute Thesis Competition and well, everybody really enjoyed Science Sante #3!!
After the winners were announced, a few people proceeded for the Book Swap session while the rest went for a Tea Break (co-powered by the bread made at the workshop). Everybody got to engage and network during this time. We also met Granite (a cat at SGB), who was pampered with a lot of affection from everyone.
Everybody left with lovely memories and knowledge they gained. I can’t wait for the upcoming Santes and I hope I get to attend more of these!