As part of the national British Science Week’s (B.S.W.) celebration of science, Portpatrick Primary got their enquiring minds in gear by participating in an open afternoon. Friends and family attended to help the children engage with a range of activities and experiments covering aspects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (S.T.E.M.)
Prior to the event, the school successfully submitted a bid for funding to purchase resources with which to promote the learning and teaching of S.T.E.M. As a result of this, the boys and girls thought it was a good idea to get the whole community involved in sharing our exploration of the world around us.
The children were presented with a wide selection of activities such as using logic to program a moveable mouse to follow desired routes around a maze, making poo and constructing birds’ nests from natural materials in the younger class. As you can imagine, the poo making activity proved the most popular. The upper class followed schematics to construct programmable robotic devices using Lego Wedo. They also built complex models using a K’nex engineering kit. The online Citizen Science activity allowed us to contribute to the B.S.W. target of tagging plastic in 250,000 images of U.K. beaches. There were dissolving, acid & alkali experiments, magnetism, electricity, Scratch programming and geology activities too.
Everyone participated fully and were free to select which activity they desired using a carousel arrangement. A great afternoon of learning was had by all.
Well done, Portpatrick! Looks like you’ve got some future scientists and engineers in the making 🙂
Regards
Mrs Moyes
D&G RAiSE Teacher