STEM week activities see our Public Engagement Scholars head out into schools Last week our Public Engagement Scholars Kelly, Dom and Emily visited St Ninian’s RC Primary School as part of the school’s STEM Week. Here, Emily tells us more about the day. The children were enjoying a packed day of activities including making slime, programming robots and a K’Nex challenge, so we hoped our new playdough workshop was going to fit in well! We visited six classes from P1-P5, running half hour workshops for the younger ones, and hour-long sessions with the older groups. We used the workshop to talk about solids and liquids, and explore the miscible and immiscible systems of water, food colouring and oil. With the older age groups we looked at salt, flour and cream of tartar under a microscope (cream of tartar looks like snow!) and then looked at a mixture of the three. We talked about how we could still see all three ingredients, and how they could be separated out again by a physical process such as sieving. We also looked at the finished playdough with the microscope and talked about how we now had a compound — something new where the ingredients couldn’t be separated out. After that, of course, there was some time to make shapes with the playdough and all 148 pupils took theirs home, to continue the fun. We had a great time being hosted by St Ninian’s, and thanks to their invitation and the opportunity to run it with multiple age groups we’ve found ways to improve it for future sessions. We were voted P3a’s favourite workshop of the day, and we were told “it’s even better than slime!”, so I think the children enjoyed the day as much as we did! Publication date 19 Apr, 2019
