Primary Science Challenge

Graduates from AWE recently encouraged pupils from Berkshire and Hampshire to enter this year’s AWE Primary Science Challenge.

The annual challenge is run in partnership with the educational charities’ Educational Business Partnership West Berkshire (EBPWB) and the Basingstoke Consortium.

AWE’s Dr Claire Leppard – project sponsor said “I have been involved in the graduate project for eight years. It’s been interesting promoting STEM at all levels, from leading our new leaders, coaching the sponsors, encouraging the graduate team and inspiring the students”.

This year two teams of AWE graduates delivered the school demonstrations and events across 18 schools in Hampshire and Berkshire. These involved a series of workshops across primary schools in the both counties to promote science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

All participating schools brought along a team to the annual competition days. Berkshire’s winner was Brimpton CE Primary School, who won a class trip to the Winchester Science Centre, while Chalkridge Primary School took first prize for Hampshire’s entry.

The winning school for Hampshire, Chalk Ridge’s Head Teacher, Claire Beswick, said: “The children have been very excited about the challenge, they’ve been really engaged and inspired. There is a real benefit from working with people in real science jobs – they are great role models for careers they can do in the future”

Pupils took part in experiments and activities including ‘Save Greg the Egg’, designing and building an air propelled car, and building catapults to score the most points. Pupils were also shown fun experiments using Liquid Nitrogen which demonstrated the change in physical properties of different objects.

Brimpton Year 6 pupil Adam (age 11) commented “It was brilliant. It was unlike anything we have done before”.

Luke pagan, graduate team member (Berkshire) said “the project has been a great opportunity to promote AWE & STEM in the community. All the children have been so enthusiastic about our experiments and we hope they have gone away with a positive image of science and all the careers available”.

Daniel Rose, graduate team member (Hampshire) said “The Finals event was the culmination of a lot of effort from both the team and students throughout the project, and it was great that it went so well. We received such positive feedback. I’d definitely recommend Primary Science Challenge to future graduates to get involved in and inspire the next generation”.