STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths

We are extremely proud and thrilled to have won a ‘Rolls-Royce Special Merit Science Prize’. Miss Riley introduced many science and technology (STEM) based initiatives last year including STEM Club and Science Week as well as leading curriculum developments through school. This work has been selected from over 2000 entries to be awarded a prize of £10,000 to continue with our science this year and go forward to a further judging round in Autumn 2019.

Information on Rolls-Royce Science Prize

STEM Club

Each week at STEM Club, children have lots of fun with practical science and technology based activities:

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) Club started this year with Year 6 making some amazing catapults and trebuchets using their design and problem solving skills.

Buoyancy

Testing how many marbles a paper boat will hold to investigate how shape and size affects a boat's buoyancy.

Balloon Power

Putting what we already know about aerodynamics into practice! The challenge: get a balloon to travel in a straight line from one side of the room to the other. To help them, the young engineers used only string, paper, tape and of course a balloon and had to work out how to improve the speed and distance of their balloon rockets.

Bubbles

Our challenge: make the ‘best’ bubble

We investigated what ingredients would make the best mixture, explored how to blow a bubble and even sampled each other’s mixtures.

Flying high

Finlay Asher, our Rolls-Royce mentor, led STEM Club’s after school session during his introductory visit. He explained how forces work before the children explored how changing wings, flaps and tails can affect the performance of paper aeroplanes.

Click here to download a paper plane template to try at home. http://bit.ly/HBAplane

Investigating Density

We used salt to change the density of water to make eggs float. Of course, that’s far too easy for us! The challenge was to add just enough salt to suspend the egg in the middle of the container.

It's a solid ..... it's a liquid .......it's Oobleck!

We have been perfecting our ‘Oobleck’ making skills. First we figured out the perfect consistency by carefully measuring water with pipets. After that, the budding scientists doubled the recipe to see if it still worked. They even tried their recipe again, substituting cornflour for hot chocolate powder!

Chemical Reactions

We looked at chemical reactions with some very impressive fizzy foam volcanos on the playground. The children also made ‘lemon volcanoes’ with bicarbonate of soda sprinkled on a cut lemon-an easy one if you would like to try it at home!

Budding Biologists

The budding biologists have been exploring the digestive system and making poo! We used coke as a substitute for stomach acid, washing up liquid to represent bile and tights for intestines. Not only this, the children were investigating what happens when we hit tuning forks against solid surfaces and touch different surfaces. With water involved...we got a little bit wet!