Another week, another celebration! This time it was the turn of British Science Week, which ran from 8th – 13th March and had the theme of ‘Innovating for the Future.’ P1-3 celebrated the week from school with various STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) activities on offer and also learned about inventors who changed the world.
First of all, pupils attempted to build the tallest tower using only dried spaghetti and marshmallows. The children were split into teams and had to explore which designs could result in the strongest and tallest tower. This proved tricky and after 15-minutes of building, the towers were not very tall, or strong! We took a few minutes to look at all of the towers, then had 5 minutes to rebuild and improve our designs. The winning team were Sean, Isla and Murray. To quote Sean, “We are geniuses!”
Next, we tried the cracker eating challenge! The girls and boys all thought that eating 3 crackers in 1 minute would be super easy. How wrong they were! We learned how important saliva is in the digestive system and eating crackers quickly is impossible!
Finally, we tried a very easy experiment that answers a tricky question. Two eggs look and feel the same but how can we tell which one is hard boiled and which is not? We shook then, spun them, rolled them, made our decision and then tested our results by dropping them on parachutes we had designed. We learned all about something called ‘Inertia’.
Meanwhile, P4-7 were busy celebrating the Science Week from home, in their final week of remote learning (“YIPEEEE!” we can hear all the parents cry!!). They had lots of different challenges to choose from, including: putting their STEM skills into action to design a solution to a real-life problem linking to the Global Goals; various science experiments and engineering challenging such as designing a marble run, making their own paint, powering a boat using a chemical reaction and creating an underwater volcano; learning about stereotypes and exploring the world of work in relation to STEM careers; and exploring innovations that changed the world.
We all had a brilliant week thinking about and exploring problems like real-life scientists and engineers!
