CLARITY brings pop-up lung lab to Dutch science festival for children

Last weekend, the CLARITY lab stepped outside its usual setting. Hundreds of curious young minds joined us for a day full of science, hands-on experiments and interactive games.

Dagmar Duijzer, one of our PhD researchers, brought her microscope and lung tissue samples to the hallway of Wilhelmina Childrens Hospital (Utrecht, the Netherlands), as part of Weekend of the Wetenschap (Weekend of Science).

Around 500 children and their families visited the hospital that weekend and had the opportunity to become scientists for a day. Not just by listening, but by taking part: children got to investigate, experiment, try things out and see how science works from up close.

^{Photo: Sandra Stokmans}

At our pop-up lung lab, Dagmar first explained how the lungs are built and how air flows through the smallest airways deep in the lungs. She also showed the children how researchers prepare the microscope work: we take a thin piece of lung tissue and place it on a tiny slide of glass. For some children, the microscope itself was already fascinating. But looking through it opened a whole new world: colourful cells, tiny hairs, and other details of the lungs that many of the children had never seen before.

Then it was their turn to think like researchers: what could they see through the microscope? How do the millions of tiny tubes and air sacs look like, and what are cells? How and where does the body take oxygen out of the air? What are the tiny hairs lining the border of the small airways, and what happens when the cells are damaged during an infection?

During Weekend van de Wetenschap, research institutions across the Netherlands open their doors to the public, offering a unique opportunity to take a peek behind the scenes of science and experience what it is like to be a researcher. 

CLARITY’s contribution to Weekend van de Wetenschap was set up in collaboration with project partners UMC Utrecht and ReSViNET Foundation. A special thanks to the organisers of Weekend van de Wetenschap and the team at UMC Utrecht/Wilhelmina Children's Hospital for making this day a great success.