• Question: How would you winning benfit the average student in Secondary schools ?

    Asked by 09crumptonpop to Zoe, Sharon, Louise, Jon, Daniel on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by oulay.
    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      If I win the money, I will use it to travel to schools around the country to deliver my stem cell workshop, and will bring stem cells into schools so that the students can see them, and learn more about what they do. Do you think this is a good idea?

    • Photo: Jon Copley

      Jon Copley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      If I win, I’d like to use the prize money to buy a special computer that will allow students at any school, anywhere, to see the ocean floor “live” as we explore it with our underwater vehicles, and to talk to us as we’re doing that.

      So in a science lesson, you could take part in exploring the deep sea, by helping us to decide what we should do next. For example, should we drive our underwater vehicle to the rocks over there to see what lives on them? Or send it down into the underwater canyon ahead of us, to investigate it? And if your class helps us to discover something new, such as a new species of animal, then you could help us name it too.

      So any student could help explore the ocean floor, discovering new features such as new underwater mountains, and new species of deep-sea creatures, that no-one has seen before, and even get to help name them. Imagine looking at a map of the world in the future, and seeing an underwater mountain marked on it that you helped to find and name. For me, that’s what being a explorer scientist is all about – and that’s what I want students at any school to be able to do, if I win.

      For that to happen, we need the special computer to send the pictures back to land from our underwater vehicle for students to watch, and to relay the chat from the students to our team on the ship. So here’s hoping!

    • Photo: Louise Dash

      Louise Dash answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      If I win, I plan to spend the money on a website for primary-school aged children, so that wouldn’t be of direct benefit to your generation of secondary school students – although I hope that it would inspire the primary kids to be interested in science when they get to secondary school!

      However, being involved in “I’m a scientist” has been so much fun that I hope to be able to do more science communication anyway, and I’m starting to think about a talk that I can prepare for GCSE students to inspire them to study physics. When I was at school, I actually found physics lessons quite boring, because it was presented in the form of problems that had already been solved hundreds of years ago. We weren’t taught anything at all about quantum physics or relativity, or about the unresolved problems in physics that still need explaining. I’m not sure how much of that is included in GCSEs these days, hopefully it’s a bit better than in my schooldays! So I hope that by actually going to schools and talking about the really interesting bits of physics might encourage more students to go on to Physics A level and University. Maybe I could even come to your school!

    • Photo: Zoe Duck

      Zoe Duck answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Well, my aim is to run some science workshops in my local area, so I guess it would only benefit people in Reading…

      I aim to teach people about all the interesting things that microbes do, which hopefully would not only help them with understanding of biology but would interest them and maybe encourage them to continue with science. Also, I would put in a few other things about wider science that would hopefully help with other subjects like physics and chemistry

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