Science Rendezvous Winnipeg is returning Saturday, May 7 with virtual and in-person programming.
This year’s online Science Chase is a fun way for people to test their knowledge of science concepts. Teams will view short videos and answer challenge questions based on them to earn a spot on the leaderboard.
Dr. Jamie Ritch
Hosted by The University of Winnipeg and University of Manitoba, the annual event aims to strengthen the quality, relevance, and impact of the science outreach community in Canada.
This year, some of the activities include the Virtual Science Chase, an in-person observation night at UManitoba to celebrate International Astronomy Day, and many classroom activities for students across the city to participate in.
As part of UWinnipeg’s involvement this year, students Monalisa Abas and Deirdre Rooney, as well as faculty members Drs. Russell Mammei, Jamie Ritch, Melanie Gregg, and Gyanendra Pokharel, have been creating videos to go with the questions in Science Chase, which is a nationwide virtual trivia challenge running May 4-7.
“Our contributions to Science Chase 2022 feature serious scientists doing experiments at their homes,” said Dr. Tabitha Wood, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Science. “I hope that this shows the public that everyone has opportunities to think like a scientist every day.”
Abas has been a member of the campus community for as long as she can remember.
After graduating from the Collegiate, she continued her studies at UWinnipeg, completing a four-year Bachelor of Science in biochemistry in 2020. She’s now pursuing a Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology, and Public Policy.
“Dr. Wood approached me with this idea she had for a video we could do where we would make a bowl of popcorn, pour some melted butter on it, come back to it later, and realize that the butter has solidified the popcorn,” she explained. “At the end of the video we ask, ‘what is the effect of lowering the temperature below the butters melting point?’”
Abas says she loved the video idea because it was a simple illustration of chemistry that’s easy to understand. While creating and editing the video was both fun and stressful, she became a master of iMovie in only a few days.
And it’s that type of fun science, she explained, that makes Science Rendezvous such “an awesome event.”
For Dr. Ritch, an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, participating in Science Rendezvous is not only fun, but extremely important for promoting science awareness and literacy to the public.
He says he’s looking forward to the exciting interactive experiments and demos taking place across the country, as well as at Winnipeg’s virtual event.
“This year’s online Science Chase is a fun way for people to test their knowledge of science concepts. Teams will view short videos and answer challenge questions based on them to earn a spot on the leaderboard,” he said. “The clips were created by volunteers across the country. If you do the quiz, you’ll find me in one of the videos taste-testing some potato chips.”
ABOUT SCIENCE RENDEZVOUS
Science Rendezvous began as a joint program between the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, York University, and Ontario Tech University in 2008. These founding partners saw the need to work together in order to launch an event of great enough scale and exciting content to engage the public in the vast wonders of science and engineering.
Since that time, Science Rendezvous has grown to include 40 of Canada’s top research institutions and over 85 community partnerships across 30 cities in 10 provinces and two territories.
To learn more about Science Rendezvous Winnipeg and how you can participate, visit their website.
