British Science Week

by Vashti Turner  on March 22, 2022  in  Science

From Friday 11th March to Friday 18th March, KAA celebrated the most eventful British Science Week yet!

Throughout the week students explored the theme of growth under various scientific fields. From a wide array of activities, students took part in growing seedlings, swabbed for germs to see them multiply in petri dishes, made their own hand sanitiser, grew crystal gardens, met with a zoologist, explored optical illusions, and much more.

The science department produced British Science Week lab books for students to complete the activities throughout the week. A special shout out goes to our avid scientists Franek (8 Slimani) and Bryan (8 Evaristo) for attending at least one event each and every day.

British Science Week also saw the finals of our Year 9 Schools Challenge, a national competition run by Imperial College London and Goldman Sachs. Our teams presented their final products to a panels of judges last week. Team “Floating Greens” came up with an idea to use footfall to generate electricity, to be used to power hydroponic gardens to be established around London to reduce the food miles of our produce. Team Modern Greeners came up with a creative solution to address waste management: by turning bins around London’s youth centres into a “Basket-Bin”! While we didn’t take home the winning prize, our teams did bring home the “Gold Star Award” for excellent presentation skills and quick thinking in their Q&A session. Each student has earned a silver CREST award for their efforts throughout the year. A huge congratulations to all who took part!

The interim science competitions saw “eggscelent” competitive spirit with the egg drop experiment – our Year 7 and Year 8 engineers developed creative solutions, but in the end Franklin cracked out a win over the competition. Years 9 and 10 designed their own chemical rockets using nothing more than recycled plastics, a pinch of baking soda, and a dash of vinegar, but it was Honeyball that launched their way to the top of the leader boards in this event. Overall, this term’s interim house competition winners are… Honeyball, winners of 5,000 house points for the interim science competitions. Congratulations!

Our thanks to the science department for a packed week of activities, and in particular Mr Prasch for coordinating British Science Week 2022.