2nd Year Science Fair

The 2nd Year Science Fair has been another great success, with huge amounts of curiosity and investigative Science on display. The final took place on Monday 16th May with Mr Johnson and Dr Pope judging the best projects sent through from the individual form group rounds. After listening to each student confidently explain how they carried out their investigation, with many students able to discuss their variables and the validity of their results; the winning presentations were chosen.

1st place was awarded to Ella M who gave an excellent and engaging presentation on how music affects memory. Her investigation was carefully planned, and her results showed some interesting and valid results. She was able to discuss her variables in detail and included information on previous research and confounding variables that may have influenced her findings. She worked hard to eliminate unconscious bias. Overall, her scientific approach was superb, she was a worthy winner.

2nd place was jointly awarded to Sam S and Alex P for their investigation into how size of submarine ballast tank affected its speed through the water. The judges were impressed by how the boys carried out their investigation and the careful consideration of their control variables. The boys built their submarines using plastic bottles and were able to answer the judge’s questions with confidence.

3rd place was awarded to Henry P-W and Asher S for their unique approach to investigating how music types affected a person’s ability to recall sequences of Uno cards. They were enthusiastic and confident during their presentation and they were able to provide insightful and intelligent answers to the judge’s questions.

Finally, a highly commended award was given to Tenny S for his fascinating investigation titled “what’s the dirtiest thing in your house?”. The whole room was horrified to discover that a mobile phone was the dirtiest, via a quantitative investigation into number of bacterial colonies grown on agar over two weeks. We will all be sterilising our phones following his presentation.

Well done to all the finalists, every presentation was interesting and it was a pleasure to witness all the hard work that went into completing them. A huge thanks to Lizzie Crane for organising the whole thing this year, what a great effort!