Harrodian Science Week 2024 featured exciting and innovative demonstrations and experiments both from seasoned pros and adventurous pupils and this year our Senior pupils benefited from the inspiration provided by experienced career scientists in the school's first Science Career Fair.
Scientists of all kinds were invited to Harrodian on 14th and 15th March as part of the school annual Science week. On Thursday morning 9s and 10s joined a team of Kings College London PhD students led by Professor Anthony Pouliopoulos in the school Theatre to witness practical demonstrations of how sound can be used to ‘see’.
One aim of Science Week has always been to demonstrate how a good scientist requires skills that have a much wider application - the ability to investigate, for example, or to get inside practical problems and solve them by building or engineering something.
Professor Pouliopoulos's brilliant use of a ‘slinky’ to demonstrate how bats, dolphins and whales use echo location to find their prey attracted a wider appreciative audience at break time. Meanwhile the professor's PhD students were giving pupils the chance to try their hand at their own ultra sound scanning.
One aim of Science Week has always been to demonstrate how a good scientist requires skills that have a much wider application - the ability to investigate, for example, or to get inside practical problems and solve them by building or engineering something. For example the 13s (Year 9) learnt about the physics of rollercoasters and teams were set the task of competing to build one from scratch out of card templates that would take the longest possible time for a marble to travel down
This year's crop of young scientists had found some intriguing questions to discover the answer to: What is a snail's favourite vegetable? Does gluten affect the flavour of cake? Does Altitude affect mould? and many more
The 11s' Science Fair – which tasks our year 7s with inventing their own scientific experiments and presenting them to visitors on stalls in the school Theatre is an established highlight of the week's activities – and this year's crop of young scientists had found some intriguing questions to discover the answer to: What is a snail's favourite vegetable; Does gluten affect the flavour of cake? Does altitude affect mould? And even are Hedgehogs attracted by colour?
The Theatre was also the setting for Harrodian’s first ever Science Career Fair. A 'brains trust' of distinguished scientific Harrodian parents – among them physicians, ecologists, pharmacologists, life scientists and teachers – manned individual stalls in the theatre where they talked about their careers and provided inspiration and advice to a visiting audience of our 13s and 15s pupils.
It all added up to a week-long celebration of science that was both challenging and accessible to all our age groups. ‘We want to provoke curiosity and inspire passion for science among our students and this week gives us the chance to really do that,' says Head of Chemistry Mr Jak Cooper. 'We’re so grateful to the Kings College team for their brilliant demonstrations and to the parents who gave Harrodians a real sense of the many different fields that a career in science can extend to.’
