Northern Ireland Science Festival 2019

For this year's festival, CDT PIADS teamed up with local staff from Seagate Technology for the second year in a row to deliver a dynamic and exciting portfolio of activities on 22 and Saturday 23 February, highlighting technological advances for data storage, underpinned by simple experiments and even virtual reality!

Between the schools-only event of the Friday for local pupils at key stage 2 and 3 and the general public event on Saturday, CDT PIADS students and staff were able to personally interact with approximately 1200 attendees of all ages.  

 

Northern Ireland Science Festival 2018

Seagate’s leading-edge partnership with the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) was on show at this year's festival at the Foyle Arena Science Showcase event on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 February. Seagate and CDT PIADS partnered to create activities including a Raspberry PI 'techno-selfienator', science of magnetics, open disc drives, Seagate wafers & components, Raspberry PI games & robotics and Seagate's 'breaking the code' quiz.

The partnership created a lively exhibit programme at the festival to inspire the next generation of data consumers. CDT students Christopher Lambert and Hannah Johnston said the reward of sharing with young people, something they haven’t seen before, was powerful. 

“It’s a WOW factor of big numbers” explained Christopher, one of the Springtown cohort of CDT students with a PHD topic around HAMR. “Sharing how much data will be in their world by 2025, explaining it’s size equal to watching everything on Netflix 500 million times and experiencing the reaction from all ages was incredible. It also helps us put in context our research. It’s up to us and everyone after us, to keep on growing to allow for our modern way of life to keep going”.

Catching a welcome breath at the end of the weekend, Hannah had still the energy to reflect on her future. Hannah hopes that her love of physics will make a difference for not only her area of science but for women in this area too. For Christopher, it’s more about gaining expert knowledge and just knowing more - whether applied in industry or his local pub quiz - it’s just about enjoying it! 

It was also the first time Seagate Springtown showcased as part of the public programme. The pace at the festival was hectic and created an invaluable opportunity to bring to life the abstract concept of data storage, nanotechnology and robotics.

The Friday was a schools-only affair with 15-minute rotations of 1300 local school pupils at key stage 2 and 3.  The Saturday event was open to the general public and CDT PIADS personally interacted with approximately half of the 1100 attendees. 

 View the full photo album on our CDT PIADS Facebook page.