Senior School Science and Psychology Faculty Update
We have had a very busy and exciting week in the Science and Psychology Faculty with the Year 6s coming to see what a senior science lesson is like (see prep section for more details), and not one but two scholar sessions and to top the week we were joined by three engineers from the Hinkley C project who gave some talks on the project and routes into STEM careers to our older scientists. The Year 8 scholars explored the chemistry topic of acids and bases, using the Royal society of chemistry work for “ Talented and gifted teaching ”. The pupils investigated how many different indicators are extracted from plants and used in a variety of combinations to give the familiar laboratory Universal indicator.
In 1950 Enrico Fermi the great Italian American physicist took his lunch partners at Los Alamos by surprise by suddenly blurting out “ Where is everybody? ”. This was the start of the Fermi paradox which, put simply, is if life is releatvly easy to start (it only took 100 - 200 million years to start once Earth was cool enough for liquid water to form) and there are so many planets out there (the milky way is estimated to have between 1 and 10 trillion planets) why have we not been contacted by an intelligent alien civilisation (or even have any evidence for any alien life forms). Our Year 10 scholars spent an hour exploring why this might be, looking at possible great barriers to life and sentience, models of how we might explore the galaxy,
reasons why an advanced civilisation might not want to get in touch and the Anthropic principle. My highlight of the year so far has to be Monday ’ s visit by three engineers from the Hinkley C build who came and
gave two very insightful talks about Europe ’ s biggest civil engineering project building the biggest nuclear reactor in the World connecting to the biggest steam turbine in the World using the biggest crane in the World, it really was superlativetatstic, and what it was like to work in a STEM career. The Year 13s, who are in the process of filling out the UCAS applications, had their eyes opened to apprenticeship degrees where you could earn money and pay no university fees, food for thought.
Blue Cake for Barnicott
Harriet in Year 8 made this beautiful blue cake today for tutor time to share with the tutor group and even dressed up in blue for our house Barnicott. It was a delicious vanilla sponge!
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