MGGS STEM Week 2016 has been incredibly busy. The week began with the Inter-House Science Big Question Video Competition in assembly, with Romans claiming first place with their answer to ‘Is there Life elsewhere in the Universe?’. This was followed by the first round of the annual Inter-House Science quiz. The finalists, Danes and Vikings, battled it out a few days later, with Danes being the victors by just 1 point!
On Monday and Tuesday, the Maths Faculty held their annual Maths Challenge for all of Year 8, as well as a day for Year 7 on Wednesday. These involved Year 8 modelling the stretchiness of sweets and Year 7 designing and building different structures with marshmallows and spaghetti. The inter-school Maths feast for Year 10 was held on Friday. On Tuesday BAE presented an inspiring lecture on engineering which all students could attend.
Also on Monday and Tuesday, Year 8 visited the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. They were able to research the adaptations of plants from different habitats and they made links between their learning in Science and Geography.
On Wednesday, several of Year 11 and 12 competed in a Forensic Chemistry Challenge and spent the day gathering and analysing evidence of a crime scene. The winners, Olivia G, Chloe G and Isobel M in Year 12, included detail in their presentation which the leaders had never heard before! They have been invited to compete in a County Final on 17th March.
Year 10 experienced the ‘Big Reptile Show’ with Martin Rapley, The Bug Man on Thursday, with the chance to find out about the lives of many different animals and interact with them. The focus was on reptiles and very popular was a young chameleon called Tripod (named because of her lost leg), which most of the students agreed was the cutest reptile they had ever seen. After a discussion on reptiles, and what makes them uniquely adapted to their environments, there were lots of opportunities to get up close with many of the animals.
Thursday also saw a local primary school, Roseacre, visit MGGS to take part in their own Science quiz and meet the reptiles. They made up part of the audience of our Inter-House Science quiz and enjoyed the audience participation! Meanwhile, the A level Computing and IT students visited the Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) company. Here they experienced the use of computing in designing visual effects for a variety of productions currently in development, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2! They also visited King Games Developers, inventors of Candy Crush, where they got some insight into some new games soon to be released.
Our final day on Friday was a celebration of both Science Fiction and World Book Day with Years 7 to 9 coming dressed up as their favourite Science Fiction book character. A fun end to a very entertaining and inspiring week in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Year 8 STEM activity By Mrs Gooding
One Year 8 student wrote: “I enjoyed the STEM activity as it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. It was interesting and I felt I was having to question myself. We designed and completed a scientific experiment to test the stretchiness of three different materials – string, elastic and an elastic band. When we had completed our experiment and refined it, we repeated it using a selection of jelly sweets. We made a poster to explain the method we used and displayed our results graphically.”