Science Week took over the Prep School in mid-March and our pupils enjoyed science experiments galore.
This year’s theme Connections encouraged pupils to look at all different types of connections focusing on teamwork and the connections between subjects, something we call Linking at school.
Year 4 made connections around the theme and properties of water. They created coloured density columns, investigating what happens when we add milk, oil and food colouring together. In another experiment, they made alginate worms and bugs.
Did you know? Alginate is used in many applications, and new ones are being found all the time. The uses range from applications in the food industry to wound dressings, medicines and dental impression materials.
Years 5 and 6 looked at how technology has changed the world. They worked in groups to research either inventions and their impacts or teams that have worked together to develop an idea. They rotated around the science laboratories taking part experiments. In biology, they used food dye to show taste buds and found out whether they were a non-taster or super-taster. In chemistry they turned milk into mouldable, biodegradable casein plastic and in physics they made conductivity putty, which lit a lightbulb without a power source!
Did you know? Casein plastics have been around since the early 20th century! They were used to make things like buttons, ornate mirrors, and hairbrushes. Many experts in the field think that, with some chemical modifications, casein plastics could replace regular plastics for food packaging.
Year 7 and 8 looked at the teamwork required to send astronauts to space and safely bring them home using mathematical connections. They watched the 2016 film Hidden Figures, the true story of three women, who all began their journey working at NASA as a part of the West Computers, a segregated group of African American women hired to process aeronautic data in the Space Race era. They also made a paper chain of connections using the HPL (High Performance Learning) values and attributes.
Did you know? Sensing how computers would make her job obsolete, Dorothy Vaughan, a key character in Hidden Figures and a mathematician, taught herself FORTRAN, an early computer programming language. She was quick to master the software and progressed to teach it to many of her colleagues in her unit.
