Science Battle – A New Ways to Popularise Science

How do we show that doing science is fun? With Science Battle.

Communications of the University of Turku created 2016 Science Battle to show the public in a concrete way how researchers tackle a new research question and to demonstrate the process of research in a fun and gamelike way.

In Science Battle two multidisciplinary researcher teams are locked inside two glass cubes to tackle questions sent by the public. The researchers have tackled questions like how long would it take for a fully-grown perch to swim around the world the shortest route possible assuming that the journey would not be slowed down by , for example, storms or other living being or if humans invent a way
to travel in time in future, are there already time travellers among us.

The Science Battle is a light-hearted and fun game which, simultaneously, truthfully depicts the way in which a researcher tackles a new problem. The objective of the Battle is not necessarily to find the correct answer, but to demonstrate how researchers start to solve a new problem. The emphasis is
also on the light-hearted spirit of the game, as well as on showing how much fun conducting research can at its best be.

Circus speaker

Erja Hyytiäinen, event coordinator at University of Turku, Finland