On Tuesday 26th March, 16 children joined Mrs Nixon and Mrs Wright for a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) workshop at Woodham Academy. Mrs Jenkins, a science teacher from Woodham, had invited us, with many other local schools, to join in with the fun. We started off our day with science, we looked at chemistry and did a cabbage test. The children were given red cabbage and water to then pipet into a smaller dish and add different liquids to see the chemical reaction and indicate if it was an alkaline or an acid. The children were amazed as they watched the colours change!
Next up was physics, they each were tasked with making a paper airplane. Mrs Nixon then had the hard job of choosing a child to take part in the flying contest. Jacob from year 3 was chosen and won the race! His paper airplane went the furthest. Well done Jacob!
Before lunch, we moved on to Technology. The children were given playing cards and had to use the bubble sort algorithm. Bubble sort algorithm, also known as sinking sort, is a sorting algorithm that runs through the list repeatedly, compares adjacent elements, and swaps them if they are out of order. We then had a competition to see which school could follow the algorithm the quickest. St. Francis’ were second!
After lunch we went onto engineering. The children had to build the highest structure using only paper. The children worked so well together and it was looking very impressive. We heard the gasps of amazement of other schools when they saw ours and we were very pleased to see our ideas being used by other schools. The measurements were in, the winning team had a structure of 2m 15cm, the children of St. Francis’ created a very impressive structure measuring in at 2m 14cm! We were so close; the children did a fantastic job and were pleased their expertise of paper structures was passed on to other schools in our community.
Our final task was maths related. We completed a maths murder mystery. We had to answer questions and crack the code to find out who the murderer was! Again, some brilliant team work was seen from our children. To finish off our day, we had a certificate ceremony. Each child received a STEM ambassador badge and certificate for their hard work over the day. Xander, in year 3, was identified as being an outstanding member of our school team and won a £5 SMYTHS toy superstore voucher! Well done Xander and all of the children who joined us. Your behaviour was impeccable and you worked so well as a team, you never gave up! What a fantastic day!
A huge thank you to Mrs Jenkins and the staff at Woodham Academy for having us and planning such an engaging and fun day. We had a blast!