Back to school: exciting FREE activities for this academic year
- 13th Sep 2024
- Author: Liberty Woodward
The second year of the Space to Learn project has now kicked off, and there are many exciting things coming up! The future events will be held across the UK until March 2025, and aim to remove barriers to access for students from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds, using funding from the UK Space Agency.
My name is Liberty and I am the Regional Project Officer for the South and East of England. Day to day I communicate a lot with science venues, schools, and of course our fabulous Space Advocates, arranging my region's careers conferences, space camps and masterclass bookings. I love, that because the types of events are so varied, each day is different, and it’s great that I get to interact with so many people from so many places. The STEM community is wonderful to be a part of, because everyone has at least one thing in common – a passion for science and space!
There are loads of events scheduled for the first term back. There are year 10 and 12 careers conferences in Herstmonceux in October and Rotherham in November. These events will be a chance for students to interact with industry professionals, learning about their personal career journey as well as the companies they work for now. We really want to showcase that the space industry has so many routes in, and that a variety of subjects and interests can feed into career opportunities that students may not even have known existed. Of course we couldn’t host at such special venues without letting students have a look around, so there will also be telescope tours at the Observatory Science Centre as well as time to look around the exhibits to learn about the science of space.
There will be a junior Space Camp in Bristol, also in October. We have already had some incredible activities which are due to make a comeback at these upcoming camps. Scuba diving, which first went ahead in Cambridge, will also be happening at the Inverness camp. The students will get to experience weightlessness and learn to move around whilst buoyant to build a satellite-like structure, acting as an astronaut training simulation. This is one of multiple excursions due to take place across the camp schedules, alongside trips to local science centres and planetariums. We'll also be running hands on activities and practical experiments which demonstrate links between the current curriculum and the space sector, such as building pressure rockets, and seeing how comets are created using dry ice.
All of these workshops feed into the project work element of the camps, where the students work in small groups to create a presentation that brings together everything they have learnt in the week. This aims to target their social emotional learning, focusing on teamwork, adopting roles, and the sharing of leadership responsibilities. The ones we have seen so far at previous camps have been fantastic, so we can’t wait to see what the next intake of students will create!
Masterclasses will also be taking place regularly in each region. These are workshop style lessons that take place in your school, delivered by one of our outstanding physics teachers. These can cover a variety of topics that all link to the curriculum, and use a space context to show how the subjects the students are learning can be linked to actual careers and areas of research. These can accommodate up to 60 children in KS3 and 4 over two half days, or 30 students in KS5 over a full day of delivery.
Availability for all of our Space to Learn offerings is limited, so if you are interested in one of these workshops, camps, or conferences please get in touch with us here at spacetolearn@spacecentre.co.uk.