It has been great lately to spend a bit of time on outreach with sone new activities including taste assessment which has a direct link to research on paediatric medicines. A large group of Brownies and Guides can to ThinkTank on Saturday 4th July to engage in science. What a treat to have an all female group and we were an all female group delivering the session. It was excellent to see that these young girls were enthused about science and wanted to be scientists of the future.

We were talking about taste and mouthfeel of medicines and they were keen to help out with suggestions of foods that had different mouthfeels and what may be good or bad in a medicine. It is always interesting to listen to their thoughts and understand the language that they use to make sure that they understand and can relate to questions that we ask. The word mouthfeel is not commonly used but they could all work out what it meant easily so that gives us confidence to use this in future

The one thing we have been struggling with is to identify a common food that has a gritty texture (similar to many medicines!!) but like us they struggled to think of many foods that were gritty – however we did receive new suggestions of like seeds on bread (poppy and sesame seeds); like the bits in strawberry or raspberry jam which are both really useful for us to explain to other children what gritty may be like.

Also big thanks to ThinkTank for allowing us to use their facilities to engage with young people – it is a real bonus for us and for our research