Well done to our Sixth Form girls for their hard work in hosting our final Royal Institution Maths and Engineering sessions on Saturday, alongside Rachel Dorris from the Royal Institution and Liz Gibbs, an independent teaching and learning maths consultant.
In this final session for 2022, Year 4 and Year 5 pupils from our Prep School, plus those from local primary schools and their parents, learned about optical engineering, building periscopes and circuits with fibre optics. They also learned about codes such as Morse code. Finally, they used the fibre optics to send Morse messages to each other via the periscopes. Our maths sessions focussed on magic squares, how to solve them, and solving algebra using numicon.
Our Prep School students shared this memorable experience with pupils from Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School, Greenfields Primary School, Priestmead Primary School and Glebe Primary School – all schools from our local community.
Returning for 2022, this series of hands-on interactive sessions was once again delivered by our Sixth Form students to younger students from St Helen’s Prep School and the local community, in our state-of-the-art STEM Centre. Our Sixth Form students prepared to lead the sessions with training from Royal Institution and Royal Academy of Engineering professors.
This final session coincided with British Science Week, a 10-day national celebration of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). Fittingly, this year’s theme was growth – and it was a pleasure to see the girls’ confidence grow throughout the weeks.
Students were challenged and inspired by this meaningful and enjoyable project, which provides them with the rigorous understanding that is necessary when teaching Maths and Engineering.
These sessions were the latest in our ongoing outreach and partnership work, in particular sharing access to expertise and facilities in our STEM Centre with our community.