A Small Laboratory of Big Ideas: More than 600 Children Gather at the EXPO Playground for the Environmental Science Festival
More than six hundred primary school pupils from twelve Belgrade schools visited the EXPO 2027 Playground yesterday, transforming Hall 5 of the Belgrade Fair into the city’s largest open laboratory. The 9th Environmental Science Festival “In harmony with nature - find your formula”, organised by the Belgrade Children’s Cultural Centre and the Chemistry and Food Technology School, offered a day in which science became a stage, pupils the main protagonists, and each new discovery a moment that broadened their view of the world.
Instead of a traditional classroom lesson, pupils worked side by side with students and professors of the Chemistry and Food Technology School, conducting experiments in physics, chemistry, microbiology, food technology, and forensics. A cup that “has no bottom”, a glass garden forming a miniature ecosystem, a liquid lamp demonstrating the properties of substances, forensic experiments revealing hidden traces, a chameleon that changes the colour of a solution, and materials that burn yet do not disappear - all of this turned the Playground into a space where science became a reality one could see, touch and understand. For many children, this encounter with science was the first moment in which they realised that, beyond the school blackboards, lies a world that reacts, changes and answers their questions.
The hands-on experience of discovery was enriched by a workshop dedicated to forensics, showing children that traces, fingerprints, and chemical reactions were not only interesting classroom experiments but real tools used to solve cases in everyday life. How far forensics extended beyond films and television series was further illustrated by the festival’s special guest, Stefan Perendija, MSc in Physical Chemistry. His lecture - “Forensics for Beginners” - held the pupils’ attention as he explained how fingerprints, traces, and invisible evidence are interpreted, and how important the role of forensic laboratories is in clarifying complex cases. For many of them, this was also a first encounter with the application of science in contexts that go far beyond school curricula.
Another event in the series of activities organised at the Playground demonstrated the strength of combining play, knowledge, and collaborative creation. This is exactly the kind of environment where children discover their talents, curiosity and inner motivation most easily, reaffirming the message of the programme “Play for Humanity: Sport and Music for All”, which reminds us that the future is built as a team, step by step, from the earliest age.
Photographed by: Expo 2027