Science Discovered!
On a cold wintery Monday morning 27 year 10 students and 3 staff members boarded a coach heading for London. Spirits were high, suitcases very heavy and the journey rather long on what has been described as “a great opportunity for out of class learning”.
At 1 o’clock we reached London, full of snacks and ready to stretch our legs. We made our way to the Science Museum and spent a few hours investigating and looking at new and incredible things. We visited the space exhibition and looked at some suits and ships used in space programmes and it was “very interesting (Matthew Taylor)”. We used computer software to study inheritance and gender related features and saw what some of the girls would look like as boys. Other exhibitions showed us how science has helped to develop society and how we live today.
We checked into the youth hostel just before our evening meal. Here, we met lots of students from other schools and colleges and got our bags unpacked before eating and taking a walk to a local Hollywood Bowl.
Bowling was good fun although Miss Kilkenny’s competitive side did better of the rest of the staff as they couldn’t cope with the upset they risked if she didn’t win. Raymond also had similar fears and ensured that his score, though breaking 100 did not beat that of Miss Kilkenny’s! After a couple of games and some fun on the dance mat we headed back to the hostel in time for an early night.
After a 7am breakfast we saw some of the sights of London from our coach. Miss Kilkenny made sure everybody knew what Bin Ben actually was and some of the boys surprised everyone with their love of high street fashion stores. The sight of the Christmas lights had everyone, staff and students very excited about our visit.
We arrived at the Piccadilly Theatre for Science Discovered at 9:30 and settled down for our upcoming lectures. Our uniforms stood out and made us look incredibly smart when sat among the college students. We then heard from Simon Watt about the genetics of superheroes and found that some of our students have peculiar tastes in their favourite mutants. We then heard from Professor Andrea Sella on how zebras got their stripes and saw some fascinating demonstrations of experiments. Finally, after several rounds of applause and cheering we saw the speaker we had all been waiting for; Professor Brian Cox. He told us about some new and wonderful breakthroughs in science that have happened over the last 3 weeks. During our question and answer session he also agreed to open a colleges observatory, leaving us to think about who we could get to open what for us in the future and found that he really does read his Twitter account.
We boarded out coach a very sleepy group that afternoon as we travelled back to Hull and the Academy. Tom Greenham thinks it has “made science fun” and George Boyes thought they were very interesting”.
