Hundreds of visitors join us for Cambridge Science Festival event

MMP staff and volunteer Cambridge University maths students were joined by hundreds of visitors on Saturday 22 March 2016 for our Hands-On Maths Fair event, part of the 22nd Cambridge Science Festival. The annual Cambridge Science Festival takes place over two weeks in March each year, and is one of the largest public understanding of science festivals in the UK. In 2016 the Festival included more than 350 events, attracting an estimated 60,000 visits in total. We welcomed hundreds of children and adults to the Centre for Mathematical Sciences on Saturday 22 March for our family-orientated Hands-On Maths Fair. Visitors were welcome to drop in to the free event throughout the day - with many people staying for several hours - to explore a huge range of mathematical activities, with a special focus on encouraging creative mathematical thinking. Visitors built fractals out of paper, developed their mathematical reasoning and problem-solving abilities with a range of hands-on mathematical activities and games, cracked codes, and re-trod the Bridges of Königsberg for a feet-on demonstration of graph theory in action. In addition, large and appreciative audiences enjoyed talks on 'Puzzling with Paper' (for ages 9+) by Fran Watson, and 'Thinking Mathematically' (for ages 11-13) by Charlie Gilderdale. Although the 2016 Cambridge Science Festival is now over, we organise other mathematical events for schools and the public throughout the year. Information on future events is updated regularly on our Events page, and to receive advance notifications of future events you can also subscribe to the MMP events email list and follow us on Twitter. Meanwhile, if you'd like to try some more mathematical activities at home, explore the links to our new Wild Maths collection below!

• Try these activities involving cutting and folding paper from our Wild Maths website.
• Explore these strategy games from Wild Maths.
• Our Square It! game was a huge hit. Challenge yourself to find out what else you can discover by simply drawing on dotty grids.
• Play the Factors and Multiples game on our NRICH website.