Event to help city's youth connect with science

The kids loved taking part and quickly picked up on techniques, said co-organiser Nicky Shepard

A hands-on event has been held to "bridge the gap" between children growing up in a deprived area of a city and the sciences, its organiser said.

Eager Explorers was held at Cambridge United Football Club's Newmarket Road stadium, in the Abbey area of Cambridge.

Cambridge University, biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca and gaming companies were among organisations offering 25 stalls with interactive activities.

Its aim was to "help the kids in this area to think about the fact that science could be a career for them", said co-organiser and Abbey People CEO Nicky Shepard.

"A lot of people think you have to be a certain kind of person to be a scientist or that you have to be really really good at school.. and actually we want people to know that science is really fun and actually there's loads of different ways of people can get into the sciences career," she said.

Ms Shepard said "a lot of people don't have a lot of cash to go and do fun things" in Abbey so the event brought the fun to them

This was the third Eager Explorers event, organised by Abbey People and King's Hedges Family Support Partnership as part of Abbey Together.

Ms Shepard said residents told her there was a lack of affordable things to do in the area.

"So this event is about getting a lot of the fun things that are happening in Cambridge to come close to home, so the kids can have fun exploring and seeing what the world around them is about," she said.

Subjects children learned about during at the stalls included coding, fossil hunting and genetics.

"People from this end of town are less likely to go to university, they're less likely to work in tech or science jobs," she said.

"What we want to do is bridge the gap between Abbey, which is an area of high deprivation... and the kinds of jobs that Cambridge is known for."

She wants the children to know they "don't have to be a certain sort of person" to go into a science career