We were honoured to attend the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates for the second year running.
The reading festival is one of the most important cultural events dedicated to children in the UAE, boasting an impressive host of engaging workshops centred around science and literature that aim to enrich the minds of 300,000 young people during the festival.
Over six days, we conducted twelve workshops for over 300 budding detectives.
Our bespoke workshops aimed to develop young, inquisitive minds and get them excited about science.
During the workshops, participants were divided into two groups and given real life forensic tasks to complete such as analysing evidence to solve a crime.
One team had to try and match shoe print overlays with the shoe print on casts, which were made from mud or plaster and try to identify who had commited a crime.
The other team were tasked with finding evidence by matching fingerprints.They pressed their fingers on to ink pads and studied friction ridge patterns, that were grouped into three distinct fingerprint types—loops, whorls and arches.
We brought Sherlock Bones, one of our skeletons out with us to assist with the crime scene – but he was very nearly impounded by customs after the hold baggage was x-rayed. Jenny was taken away under armed guard to explain why we needed him with us! They all saw the funny side when they realised why they were in UAE. Phew!
