SACRED HEART STEM SOCIETY 15 YEARS

The Sacred Heart STEM club has now been running for 15 years!

Mr Bell, our lead technician, summarises some of the highlights below:

I was tasked in the Summer term of 2010 by the then head of science to make a go of the science club, it had existed in one form or other before but had always fizzled out after a few weeks. I was determined to make a success of it and set about on a publicity campaign around the school with posters making a play on ‘2001 A space odyssey’; reading ‘2010 A science club’ – probably lost on the students but it amused me!

I tried to think outside the box when writing session plans with activities I hadn’t seen other clubs do, some examples are;

‘Glow in the dark’- looking at fluorescence and phosphorescence with ‘light painting’ using long camera exposures and torches. This has remained one of the most popular activities we do every year during Winter when we can be assured of darkness.

We have also looked at ‘Anodising’ of Titanium metal, the surface of which changes colour when made an anode in an electrolytic cell.

‘Strange materials’, an activity looking at unexpected physical and chemical reactions; the Leidenfrost effect where water skims around on a hot metal surface and destruction of aluminium pop cans using gallium metal – this forms an alloy with the aluminium which destroys it’s crystal structure and a reason why gallium is forbidden to be transported on aircraft.

We have also extracted Iodine from seaweed which bioaccumulates the halogen from salts in seawater.

Another fun activity is the ‘Science of sound’ where we use audio processing to produce artificial echoes, reverb and electronic voice processing with a ring modulator to produce Dalek voices!

Many student teachers have supported over the years as well as one of our cover supervisors here at Sacred Heart who helped for several years. Currently our biology Technician, Amber, has helped write plans geared towards biology and she has also helped with promotional material. 

We have won categories at science fairs in the past but what has made me most proud is that some students return to be mentors to younger students, with a couple of girls in particular staying with us throughout their time at SHHS.