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Summary

Join us to celebrate the opening of The Invention Rooms at White City with a free community open day of free maker activities for people of all ages:

  • Try 3D ‘virtual reality’ design
  • Make UV jewellery inspired by medicine
  • Meet intelligent robots of the future
  • Enjoy live music and fun entertainment
  • Explore The Invention Rooms on guided tours
  • Eat tasty food to fuel your creativity…

The full details about what will be on offer are below. Come along any time between 12 and 3pm to get creative, meet The Invention Rooms team and chat to scientists, engineers and designers from Imperial College London about their amazing research.

Location 

The Invention Rooms are 2 minutes’ walk from White City station.

Registration

This event is free to attend and you can just turn up on the day or you can register in advance to get updates on the event as more activities are confirmed.

This event is part of Imperial’s Fringe event-series, exploring the fun and creative side of science.

What’s happening on the day?

Drop-in activities for all ages:

Biomarker Bracelets

Create a piece of jewellery or a key ring from beads that reflect the diversity of cells within a cancer tumour with the team from
Cancer Research UK Imperial College Centre – discover which ‘cells’ in your creation contain biomarkers using our UV light.

3D virtual reality Design Challenge
Take your creativity into the 3rd Dimension with student inventors, Gravity Sketch! Their amazing virtual reality design software allows everyone to try out
designing amazing 3D models, scenes, and more!

Getting arty with your heart-y

Use wooden lolly sticks to recreate the microscopic structure of heart muscle cells with National Heart and Lung Institute.
Learn about pulmonary hypertension and get a heart painted on your hand

Make-and-take Chemistry

How does nail varnish work? And how can red cabbage tell us how acidic something is? Discover the chemistry around us and make
decorations and your own experiment kit to take home with researcher Raquel Prado-Garcia and her Chemistry Department lab-mates! 

Unchoke our oceans: think outside of the bottle

Find out about the global plastic problem, and some of the cutting-edge approaches to tackling it, including how to turn waste into a useful material with researchers and innovators
from Imperial’s Centre for Environmental Policy and Department of Civil Engineering

Creative Collages

Contribute to the National Heart and Lung Institute’s heart and lung collages using everyday materials to interpret heart and lung diseases

Making with Nature

Make cool stuff from natural materials with the friendly team from Hammersmith Community Garden Association.

Making art from fat!

Join Anna Tascini from Imperial’s chemistry department to make your own synthetic cell, with a simple experiment you can try at home.
You can also explore fat molecules’ “split personality” to create beautiful complex artwork!.

Paper Drone Making
Make paper drones then fly them in our special arena using the power of your smart phone with Imperial’s Drone Society

Felt-making

Make your own colourful felt from wool to take home with White City crafter, Sabine Fouchier

Lung logic game

Play the National Heart and Lung Institute Bacteria Logic game to learn about the lungs and create your own bacteria lung maps

Dolphin Board of Awesome – SurFFF

Meet the inventors of the Dolphin Board of Awesome! Hear how they use a special method called ‘SurFFF’ to combine plastic and natural waste
 materials to 3D-print compostable surfboards!

Bendy Bones

Find out what our bones are made of and what experiments scientists do to understand how what causes bone disease with the team from Imperial College’s
Molecular endocrinology lab, at Imperial’s Department of Medicine. Make your own bone model then have fun crushing it!

The Inventions Rooms in W12

Meet the friendly team at  Imperial’s new community space The Invention Rooms and sign up for updates about all the fun activities events coming up over the next few months.

We’ve also got tasty food on offer from Jollof Mama as well as music from UFO Steel Band and lots more! 

Workshops and Tours

The Invention Rooms MakerSpace Workshops

Get inventing in a fun and fast workshop in our creative community MakerSpace – there are three to choose from and we’re running them every half an hour.
Don’t miss out on the fun – sign up for one of the limited workshop places! Note that workshops are for ages 12 and up.

Advanced Hackspace team – 3D printing and behind-the-scenes tours!

Meet the team from the Invention Rooms’ Advanced Hackspace and find out what they get up to in their workshop. Enter the Hackspace Raffle to win a 3D print of your face and sign up to go on one of the exclusive behind-the-scenes tours of the Hackspace.
Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult on the tour. 

Volunteering

Volunteering opportunities are available at this ev ent.

We won’t be able to run this event without your precious support. If you are able to help out at this event, this will be greatly appreciated.

Please sign up here to guarantee your preferred volunteer slot.