The Science Festival 2018 with NPI

Our stand – the tent on a grassy area, more precisely – could be seen on September 5th during all the day at this year's 6th edition of the open-air Science Festival. The event with the subtitle „Fun (not only) Scientific and Technical Laboratory at Kulaťák“ was organized by the Czech Technical University (CTU), the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), the National Technical Library and the House of Children and Youth of Prague, at Vítězné Square in Prague´s quarter Dejvice near to CTU buildings.

We had one of 102 interactive expositions of 43 exhibitors and we could reach out to a few of 17,200 visitors. Especially, morning visit of elementary school pupils almost blocked one of the main entrances to Dejvická metro station.

Martina Lužová performs Uranus maze, one of the small visitors on the left side is completely absorbed in the VR world.

This year's theme was „Technology Moves the World“, and the event was also newly hosted by the National Technical Library building, where lectures and debates (mainly for secondary school students) were held in Belling Hall, focusing most on the issue of climate change and impending drought.
The event was certainly helped by the sunny weather (sometimes too sunny). Several dozen distributed NPI brochures testify to the fact that deeper fans for our work have come too, and even our posters hanging inside the tent have also taken interest. Three NPI workers, Jakub Šlegl and Martina Lužová from Radiation Dosimetry Department (RDD) and Miroslav Dočkal, took part in our presentations. During the VR presentation of the flight of the Fík 3 stratospheric balloon, we alternated with Jiří Hovorka, teacher of the Fík 3 student team, and his former pupil (high school student now) Barbora Cabalková, the author of accompanying video about preparation of the flight.
Like other institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences, we have repeated our program from the Science Fair 2018, although this time we did not have our big card - the „vacuum theater“ (the Pfeiffer Vacuum set) and its presenter Vladimír Semián. The VR flight presentation of Fík 3 and the Uranium maze were therefore completed with two banners on the Bolidozor radio network for meteorite monitoring, presented by its co-creator Roman Dvořák, student of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEE CTU). Strictly speaking, it is not a nuclear physics, but it is closely related to the work of our RDD and it is also using some of technological staff developing by the RDD workers, such as the open-source mLAB kit.

Soon after the start of the event, a number of people interested in our stand has grown considerably.

Our stand was found in the internal sound broadcasting of the festival, Martina Lužová was interviewed. The crowd in front of the maze and VR was scattered by the arrival of uninstallation team and the „overheating warning“ of our VR glasses.
The patron of the festival was Prof. Václav Pačes, event was held under the auspices of Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Mr. Robert Plaga, Mayor of Prague Mrs. Adriana Krnáčová, President of the CAS Mrs. Eva Zažímalová and Mayor of Prague 6 Mr. Ondřej Kolář, the rector of the CTU Mr. Vojtěch Petráček was there too.

Title photography: Jakub Šlegl and Martina Lužová prepare a uranium maze in the background, Barbora Cabalková on the right side serves a presentation with VR glasses and Roman Dvořák on the left side describes the principle of Bolidozor.