It’s nearly IF festival time!

Get your shoes on (or slippers, if you’d prefer online events) and head to IF Oxford, the Oxford science and ideas festival, over the month of October. Ideas will be plentiful, conversations thought-provoking, and activities fun, creative and stimulating.

This year’s programme has something for everyone of all ages, in venues around Oxford or online, including performances, interactive events, and hands-on experiments. Festival goers can connect with experts, explore science through the arts, and have fun!

The Oxford Trust is delighted to be supporting the festival. And, Science Oxford is contributing with few exciting activities of our own the programme. At the weekly ‘Glow Your Own’ coding sessions, starting on 12 Oct, you’ll be able to programme moving lanterns for Oxford’s Christmas Light festival. On 15 October, our fabulous team will be presenting Science Oxford Live demos at Oxford Works, Oxford Business Park. Then there’ll be rocket-building and coding on 24 October at BLAST! at Blackbird Leys Astronomy, Space and Technology zone. Follow the links on our event page to book.

Aside from our own activities, our team has shared some recommendations of other events they’ll be attending themselves.

For many hands-on interactive activities all in one place and for all ages, the Explorazone will be at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church. There’ll be AI and computing, biology and the environment, engineering, and many other topics to explore. Here, on October 8, there will also be a dedicated quieter hour for adults and children within the autistic spectrum, or who have other neurodiverse conditions, and their families.

If you like designing, creating, building, tinkering and other engineering activities, there’ll be some great activities you can do as a family. Let your imagination run wild at Lego club workshops (10 and 17 October) and see what creations you can build. Design and build new inventions and creations out of old junk at the Junk Engineering workshop (20 October).

For the animal lovers, why not check out the Animal Senses Zone on 22 October? You could chat to researchers from the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology and discover the science of special animal senses – like a hawk’s incredible sight or a bee’s senses of smell and taste – and also meet some of the animals they work with.

These are just a handful of the activities to experience at the festival, so browse through the programme, pick out your favourite, and book soon. Information on all activities, including how to book, can be found at: https://if-oxford.com/events/