Being Healthy

We are looking forward to a busy week of school visits.
On Monday we will be in Great Sutton Ellesmere Port with Meadow Primary school for the start of their Healthy Schools Week.
We will be doing our All About You show for each Key stage.
So Timmy will be coming with us to help KS1 create a healthy lunch box

we will be exploring our feely tubs and trying to work out what is inside the sound eggs

Then with KS2 we will challenge a few brave volunteers to put their hands into the GROT BAGS and discover the grunge inside, find out why we need to wash see the amazing images up close and personal of our skin. We will discover just how much snot we produce when we have a cold and are those really skin cells shed?????

In the afternoon we will be working with year 4 making and testing home made toothpaste.
So on a sunny afternoon I was preparing two class sets of ceramic tiles ready for cleaning

Big Bang @ school in Fazakerley

We had a super day with the team from MerseySTEM, a great gang from Amey and the Big Bang Northwest folk sharing science with year 9 at Fazakerley High School.

Quite an early start for a day themed around our environment sponsored by Amey.
We had been asked to present on Plastics - Superhero OR Supervillain!
So we decide to resurrect an old favourite using Polycaprolactone AKA POLYMORPH which is a thermo moulding biodegradable plastic.
These great little granules transform at about 62C into transparent, chewing gum looking, stretchy, wonderfully tactile strands that can be moulded into a huge range of things for hobbies, electronics, engineering and crafts.

We chose to make keyrings with a bit of added bling in the form of glitter.

We used silicon ice cube moulds and added a small key chain. There were quite a few creative folk who designed their own rather than use a mould - very inventive!

We started with a brief intro and discussion about why plastic has such a bad reputation and how we can help to reduce the energy and waste issue by recycling. So the challenge is to find a material  like plastic but with none of the bad points - well we couldn't quite get rid of all the bad points but certainly the waste issue - a biodegradable plastic really helps.

Throughout the day we had 6 workshops so everyone in year 9 got to experience our presentation.

Once they got their hands on the polymorph and had a good play to discover just how it behaved they then used pre glittered moulds to make their bespoke keyring.

The school made us extremely welcome with a super lunch prepared by the in house catering staff.

We left the science team with a sample and all the little left over bits from the day so they should have good fun and a great introduction to polymers.

thanks for having us FHS

Busy Times

So here we are on the final stretch of this academic year. It has flown by and I can't quite believe the summer holidays are around the corner.
However this half term is a really busy one for Science2U with lots of school visits and an appearance at The Big Bang North West in July.    nearme.thebigbangfair.co.uk/North_West/

So lots of preparation for all these different events plus we are updating our shows and website over the summer so Helen and I are spending time thinking about where we want to go next and what workshops and shows we can develop for Autumn 2014.

We have been asked to take part in MerseySTEMs Big Bang@school in Fazakerley which has been sponsored by Amey who work extensively with Liverpool City Council.
http://www.amey.co.uk/AmeyinYourRegion/NorthernEngland/LiverpoolCityCouncil.aspx

The theme is rubbish and recycling ( something we are very familiar with from our Catalyst days) Our session is titled Plastics - hero or villain and we have decided to revive an old favourite - we are going to make polymorph keyrings. I have sourced polymorph from e-bay plus a huge bag of keyrings and we have been collecting ice cube moulds. We will be doing 6 workshops for Year 9/10 throughout the day - and using a urn to manage a constant source and temperature of water we should have a great day. Hopefully there will be pictures to follow next week.

Watch this space for more info about our adventures over the next few weeks and all the latest on the revamped website