MMM at the Westgate Shopping Centre (2025)

This is the third year that the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) held its Showcase at the popular Westgate Shopping Centre in the centre of Oxford. Like last year it was held jointly with the NIHR Oxford Health BRC.

Our research software engineers had redesigned and rewritten our dance mat game so now you took on the role of a doctor firing different coloured antibiotics at incoming bacteria. So far so easy: over time, however, the bacteria get resistant to one or more of the antibiotics (denoted by a coloured shape appearing on them) meaning a lot of foot stamping is required to keep changing to the right colour antibiotic!

The game starts nice and slowly but the difficulty increases rapidly. On the day a few people scored over a hundred but anything more than that was too challenging…

It was half-term which was great as it meant lots of parents, grandparents and children stopped by and talked to us about our research. By the end of day we’d spoken to 130 people; half of them had heard about the Showcase beforehand, three members of our PPIEP committee and some ex-members of MMM dropped in to say hi, the Deputy Head of Mabel Prichard School (whose school we visited earlier in the year) and finally we spoke to one person who was halfway through a 10km run!