British Science Week

The theme for British Science Week this year is time! In form times, the students examined ‘oldified’ versions of teachers and pondered the intricacies of time’s impact on the human body. They tested their own reaction times, saw Mr Sexton work out the time of death of a chicken and delved into the concept of time travel.

Years 7 & 8 pupils were tasked with escaping from the science lab after being locked in by the chronotron labs company! The pupils had to crack codes to fill out a time machine blueprint, disable an alarm and finally work out the code for a combination lock to escape. They worked brilliantly together and displayed many of the learning habits including resilience, critical thinking and collaboration.

Floor is Lava – A STEM challenge – Given only three cups and five sticks, the pupils were challenged to keep as many counting bears as possible out of the lava. The pupils took on this challenge with glee and found many different ways to stack and balance the bears.

Fossil Workshop – Years 3-5 were lucky enough to receive a workshop from Neal Baker, a retired geologist and STEM ambassador. Neal brought with him some fascinating fossils and the pupils were wowed by them all, from some real mammoth hair to a spinosaurus tooth!

Talk from European Space Agency – We were incredibly lucky to have Sarah Wittig, a photonics engineer of the European Space Agency, call into the MFT theatre from the Netherlands for a space talk with Years 6, 7 and 8.  Sarah specialised in the construction of lasers for varying space projects including the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) project and the CO2M (Carbon Dioxide monitoring) mission. The talk was incredibly interesting and both pupils and teachers learned about the European Space Agency and some exciting projects set to be launched into space over the coming 11 years.

Inferno ghosts – The pupils enjoyed lighting their tea bag ghosts on fire and watching them fly, then trying to catch what remained on the descent. Some ghosts even flew so high they touched the laboratory ceiling.

Rubens Tube – All pupils in the prep school were shown an exciting demonstration of the Rubens tube as part of science week’s “demo day”. The pupils saw the sound waves form out of flames and particularly enjoyed hearing music being played down it, the flames jumping with the beat! This helped display how the pitch of sound changes as the frequency does, in a very exciting way.