Blog - Build a Plant: Public Engagement with Plant Sciences

Did you know that researchers from the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences (IMPS) run public engagement workshops for schools and local communities?

Edited and collated by Tea Reinert

Recently, with the support of the Public Engagement team of the School of Biological Sciences, they ran a hands-on workshop for over 8 years old children and their families at the National Museum of Scotland as part of the 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival.

One of the Institute’s PhD students Bob Mason (Steven Spoel Lab) worked with the Public Engagement team as well as other IMPS volunteers and the 3D designer CraftMeng to bring this workshop to fruition. In the workshop, participants used 3D-printed parts like roots, stems and flowers to build a plant and tested whether it could survive challenging conditions real plants face every day.

I reached out to the team that developed and ran the Build a Plant workshop to see what their favorite parts of the workshop were. They had a lot of great things to say:

I mentored Bob from the start to end, and it was nice to see his idea crystalise and develop into an engaging workshop. In addition, his public speaking skills and understanding about how to best engage children and families developed so much during this time. A highlight, was to see how everyone involved joined forces and teamed up successfully working together during the whole process: from designing and 3D printing plant parts to running the workshop.

Maria Fanourgiaki Public Engagement Officer, School of Biological Sciences

One volunteer, Diego Sanchez Ganfornina (PhD student, Hetherington Lab) had a blast and wrote, 

Assembling the plants was fun, but I most enjoyed listening to participants’ views when attempting to choose the different types of roots that plants would exhibit in different biomes – this really showed engagement and critical thinking, which is at the end of the day what we were hoping to achieve!

Zishan (Sannie) Fu (PhD student, Hetherington Lab) who was also a volunteer, said,

It was an inspiring experience to build the bridge between 3D printing technology and plant sciences. In this collaboration, we brought together our knowledge about plants, expertise in functional design, and professional support from the School’s Public Engagement team. Public engagement is definitely an interdisciplinary space to meet people with the same passion!

I'm very grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with everyone who was working on this project. Designing plants was something new for me and making them modular while keeping the appearance relatively easily recognisable was a stimulating task. I enjoyed every part of it from brainstorming the ideas to seeing the pictures of kids playing with it. I’m happy to help bring more educational and creative projects to reality!

CraftMeng 3D-printed plants collaborator

We’re happy to count this workshop as a success for public engagement at the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences! IMPS researchers are very active in engaging people of all ages about plant sciences and they have a lot of fun while doing so.

If you are a teacher interested in our school workshops, please get in touch with Dr Janet Paterson, Public Engagement Manager at the School of Biological Sciences.

You can also find out more about the School’s Engagement with Community and Schools.

 

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