Viewing archives for Lower School Science

Finalists in QE’s Mars Lander project not only impressed with their knowledge of space travel, but also showed they had got to grips with the more down-to-earth requirements of academic research. 

Assistant Head (Pupil Progress) Sarah Westcott paid tribute to the finalists in the Year 7 contest, praising them for eschewing all plagiarism and crediting references accurately. 

The boys had to put together a PowerPoint file with facts and figures about the requirements, challenges and risks of sending a manned spacecraft to Mars, with shortlisted entrants then submitting a video of themselves delivering the presentation.  

While their space knowledge was an important factor, the main purpose of the project included teaching the boys about what constitutes plagiarism and how to carry out basic referencing, and developing their fact-finding skills, both online and written. The project was part of the Summer Term’s Personal Development Time scheme of work. 

After shortlisting nine pupils to submit a recording of their work, Head of Year Tom Harrison had the difficult task of selecting just four for Dr Westcott to assess and judge. Placing Colin Copcea first, Dr Westcott said: “Colin really impressed with his presentation – not only his grasp of scientific facts and choice of images, but also his use of references and sources.” 

Daniel Macholl took second place, with Kayilai Dinesh and Akhilesh Karthikeyan sharing the third spot. 

“I was very impressed with the amount of effort the boys had put into their research and presentations,” said Mr Harrison. “It was really very difficult to select just four as the finalists, as the standard was very high. All the participants did very well.” 

Dr Westcott was also struck by how well the boys presented their findings and the way in which they had clearly grasped the essentials of referencing and the unacceptability of plagiarism. “They generally chose highly reputable sources for their research – NASA, the BBC – and looked carefully at the file extensions, for example .gov, which give a fairly good indication as to whether a particular website is likely to be reliable.” She told them that although Wikipedia could be a good starting point for research, it should never be quoted as a primary source, as its independence could not be guaranteed. 

In a recorded adjudication for Year 7, she praised the boys for their high level of scientific content and offered advice on how their work could be even further improved. 

From the history of powered flight to the physics of theme park rides, Year 9 pupils covered a lot of ground on their four-day Science trip to Paris.

Travelling by coach and ferry, the 43-strong group not only literally covered many miles, but also made great strides in their learning as they took in real-life examples of scientific principles in action.

Physics teacher and Academic Enrichment Tutor Gillian Deakin said: “The tightly packed programme had been planned to, on the one hand, showcase some of the interesting applications of Science from the classroom while, on the other, providing discussion points for future lessons.”

The first stopping-off point for the group was the National Air and Space Museum of France, at Paris’s historic Le Bourget, still a working airport for private flights. With nearly 20,000 exhibits, the museum features two Concordes among its 150 aeroplanes. The boys sampled the flight simulator and learned about the development of flight, from air balloons to the modern day.

Pupil Aarush Verma particularly enjoyed this visit: “I attend air cadets outside of school, so it was nice to see a variety of different aircraft, from the first planes to modern passenger planes, such as the A380.”

The rockets there were a highlight for his fellow pupil, Vignesh Rajiv:“I was very impressed by the scale and size of them.”

Later, at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, the biggest science museum in Europe, the group were able to see exhibitions on themes from genetics to energy. “I found the robotics section especially fascinating as visitors could control the robots,” said Aarush. “It linked up really nicely with my personal interests at School, where I’m active with VEX Robotics.”

Another highlight of the trip was a night tour of Montparnasse. “We watched the illumination of the Eiffel Tower at 8pm and got amazing views of Paris,” said Miss Deakin.

The following day the group headed off to Disneyland Paris where they sampled various attractions, from Hyperspace Mountain (a Star Wars-themed ride), to It’s a Small World, a water-based boat ride with audio-animatronic dolls.

“The boys have been studying energy transfers in Science, and the rides have furnished knowledge which they will now have the opportunity to discuss in the classroom,” said Miss Deakin.

“We also got to watch the parade, which included several childhood favourites, and there were some exciting pyrotechnics, which showcased yet more interesting applications of Science.”

The final day included a quick stopover at the Cité Europe shopping centre for lunch and souvenirs. Although the ferry home was delayed by over an hour and a half because of poor weather, a free meal provided the boys with compensation for the hold-up.

Five veterans of QE’s past national and international successes in space design competitions returned to Barnet to help stage an inter-school Galactic Challenge.

Aadil Kara (OE 2010–2017), who has just completed the second year of a Physics degree at Imperial College, is currently Chair of the Galactic Challenge (GC) – a regional competition for younger pupils and a sister competition to the UK Space Design Competition (UKSDC). In his final year at QE, Aadil progressed from the UKSDC to the International Space Settlement Design Competition, hosted by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Aadil, worked with QE’s Head of Physics, Jonathan Brooke, to help the School host a Galactic Challenge for secondary schools in London.

“Old Elizabethans are currently playing a key role in the organisation of both the UKSDC and the GC,” said Mr Brooke. “I’m hugely impressed by their willingness to give up their time to support these competitions which give children from schools across the country experience of working in large teams under a tight deadline – a taste of the challenges associated with professional life that are difficult to replicate in the classroom.”

Helping Aadil and Mr Brooke were Aadil’s QE contemporaries and former UKSDC co-competitors, Neelesh Ravichandran, Harikesan Baskaran and Sam Bayney, as well as David Dubinksy, who attended QE from 2012–2016. Neelesh, Harikesan and Sam all served as Coordinators on the day, while David, who, like Aadil, reached the international stages of UKSDC in his year, was the volunteer CEO for one of the competing teams, or ‘companies’.

The Galactic Challenge is a space industry simulation challenge for students aged 10-14. Children design a settlement in space within just a few hours, competing against other teams, as well as the clock.

At QE, in addition to the School’s own Year 7 company, named Columbus Aviation, there were entries from: Dame Alice Owen’s School; The Charter School, North Dulwich; The Henrietta Barnett School and The Latymer School.

Aadil said: “We run GC competitions throughout the country firstly to stimulate students’ interests in STEM from the early ages of secondary education, and secondly to help them develop ‘soft skills’, including team-working and interpersonal skills. Having first participated in the process in the Sixth Form, it was a pleasure to be able to bring the competition back to the School.”

The ‘companies’ worked to complete a task set by the fictional Foundation Society. In the morning, they were given a Request for Proposal (RFP) co-written by Aadil that reflects a typical design brief in the space engineering industry; they then spent the day producing designs in response, assisted by a volunteer ‘CEO’ for each company.

The scenario involved them jumping forward to 2069, coinciding with the celebration of the centenary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Students produced designs for Armstrong, the first holiday resort on the moon, named in honour of Neil Armstrong, famously the first person to step on to its surface in 1969.

The Armstrong resort had to include a commemorative area around the Apollo 11 landing site and to host trips from tourists visiting from other settlements around Earth’s orbit. Competitors also had to find a way to make the lower half of the Apollo 11 Lunar Model (which remains on the moon’s surface) the centrepiece of a tourist attraction, whilst considering how to conserve the site.

The companies’ design proposals considered almost all aspects of the design of a futuristic space settlement, from the activities offered to tourists to the methods of power generation.

At the end of the day, the companies presented their work in ten minutes to an audience of parents, their peers, and a judging panel. In the presentations, students suggested ideas including: settlements made out of recycled materials; rearing rabbits on the moon, and Earthrise viewing platforms, with the home QE team suggesting lunar bungee-jumping. The winning team was a combined company – Astrodyne Delta – drawn from Dame Alice Owen’s School and The Charter School, North Dulwich.

Afterwards, Neelesh, who has come to the end of his second year at Imperial, where he is reading Electrical and Electronic Engineering, said: “Volunteering at UKSDC is a truly rewarding experience. The enthusiasm, curiosity and ingenuity of the participants is awe-inspiring and has served to remind me of why I study engineering. Both these competitions are a test of character and imagination, for volunteers and participants alike.”

Harikesan has finished the second year of a Mechanical Engineering/Computational Engineering and Design at Southampton. He starts a placement with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars this month. “Volunteering at the UKSDC and GC competitions provides an invaluable opportunity to encourage students to see STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics] in its true colours.”

David, who has just finished the third year of an Aeronautical Engineering degree at Durham University, still recalls the inspiration he drew from the UKSDC himself: “Taking part in the competition sparked a strong obsession with space; I was drawn by the utopian, fantastical designs of future space settlements and enjoyed imagining life in such a future. I opened a space society at QE, which some OEs may remember, and attended the annual Student Space Conference in Year 12, a fantastic event organised by the same parent organisation as the Galactic Challenge, the UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (UK SEDS). At Durham, I’ve also joined the university’s SEDS branch where we had some great networking with brave local startups and have helped organise trips to the Student Space Conference. My first internship was in a small electronics company, as it was technically in the space sector.”

Although the internship proved to be a disappointing experience, during his time there he was able to re-focus on what he really wanted – “to pursue unprecedented and utopian technology design” – which led him into the field he is currently targeting, namely “minimal-fuel, lighter-than-air travel, in other words engineering modern blimps and airships!” It is, reflects David, “all a long chain of events from saying ‘yes’ to my friend asking me if I wanted to fill an empty space in the first QE UKSDC team, which I turned down at first because I was nervous!”

Sam has finished the second year of a Medicine degree at Southampton. He said: “It’s good to see kids taking an interest in these types of projects at this age – it develops skills they will need to solve the global problems facing us in the near future.”

Year 8 pupil Maxwell Johnson’s colourful and carefully researched poster about plastics won first prize in a Royal Society of Chemistry regional competition.

Entrants in the under-13 competition run by the RSC’s Chilterns and Middlesex Division were challenged to prepare a poster under the heading of The Chemistry Around Us.

Maxwell’s multi-coloured entry spelled out his title using letters from the Periodic Table and then set out the advantages of plastics – a ‘wonder substance’ – while contrasting these with the problems this ‘material mess’ causes.

He received a certificate signed by RSC divisional committee member Vanessa Nottage, together with £25-worth of Amazon vouchers.

QE Chemistry teacher and Extra-curricular Enrichment Tutor Keith Bugler said: “Many congratulations to Maxwell on the research and care he put into his entry: I thought his poster was awesome!”

Among the positive attributes of plastics that Maxwell listed were its light weight, durability and versatility, Dr Bugler said. However, Maxwell pointed out the problems caused in the oceans when UV rays make plastics crumble into microplastics less than 5mm long. These endanger many sea animals, including birds and whales, and also enter the human food chain, causing health problems such as hormonal dysfunction and cancers.

A QE team has reached the national final of the prestigious Top of the Bench chemistry competition after winning their regional round.

Amogh Bhartia and Heemy Kalam, of Year 9, Bikiran Behera, from Year 10, and Year 11’s Hari Gajendran won first prize in the Chilterns and Middlesex Region to secure their place at the final in the spring, where they will compete against the UK’s best-performing schools.

Chemistry teacher Charani Dharmawardhane said: “The boys led consistently throughout the competition; they had trained for weeks and their efforts certainly paid off.”

Top of the Bench is an annual event organised by The Royal Society of Chemistry. As well as providing pupils in Key Stages 3 and 4 with an opportunity to compete against each other, it also presents them with scientific challenges which take them beyond the confines of the curriculum. Its stated aim is to “encourage and reward high achievement in chemistry”.

The hour-long regional competition at St Benedict’s School in Ealing comprised nine rounds. The boys had to work together and apply their knowledge as creatively as possible. The questions ranged from naming compounds to knowing which former British Prime Minister read Chemistry at university (Margaret Thatcher).

From Leonardo da Vinci to Stephen Hawking, this year’s entries to QE’s Science House competition covered a full gamut of top scientists across the ages.

Participants were required to research eminent and unusual scientists and produce a poster. First prize went to Year 7’s Hadi Al-Esia, from Stapylton House, who chose the brilliant, but slightly lesser-known, Nikola Tesla.

“This year we had 25 excellent entries,” said Biology teacher Melanie Haj Hussein. “The competition was open to boys in Years 7 and 8, and the standard was very high. We were very impressed with the effort they had put in. Not only had they chosen interesting scientists, but they had presented the information in creative and engaging ways.”

Hadi’s choice, the Austrian-American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, was born in what is modern-day Croatia in 1856, but emigrated to America in his early twenties to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York. He worked there for a brief period before striking out on his own and developing the Alternating Current (AC) induction motor and related AC patents.

Hadi’s fact-packed poster featured ‘electric’-style silver writing against a dark-blue background and also used visual effects related to the electricity theme, including a lightning flash and an image of the globe incorporated into a light bulb.

His poster and those of the runners-up, Omar Hashmi, Chanakya Seetharam, Theo Moses and Advik Balaji, all from Year 7, are being displayed in the Science Department.