STEM Week
Posted on: 29/03/2022In March we celebrated STEM week. Science, Maths and Computing departments led a range of activities throughout the week within class and as enrichment activities to celebrate the week.
Pi Day: On Monday March 14th (3.14) the week started with celebrations from the Maths team celebrating ‘Pi day’, with competitions, Pi Poetry and Pi cookies as some of the highlights to the day.
Faraday Challenge: On Tuesday 36 Year 8 budding engineers found out what it’s like to be an Engineer while competing for the Faraday Challenge, our guest presenters from the Institute of Engineering and Technology gave students a real world problem to solve and the teams competed in teams of 6 to secure a spot on the national leader’s board.
STEM week coincided with British Science week, the Science team arranged a range of activities, whole school assemblies, workshops and primary school visits to celebrate the STEM week.
Cross curricular STEM
During the week many non-STEM subjects are shared with students how their subject area naturally crosses over with STEM subjects helping students to see the link between multiple subject areas.
Some highlights of how STEM was explored in some subject areas:
- In MFL reminded students that you have to know maths to count in French and periodic table symbols come from Latin names of elements.
- In Geography the link with civil engineering and between STEM subjects and cross over with Geography was explored.
- In Art, the work of Anita Chowdry was explored as polymath artist, it was fascinating to learn about how the underlying principles of her work come from Maths, Natural Geometry, the history of Science and technology.
- In Music and Media the use of technology was widely discussed and explored.
- In Psychology the link was made with the subject area as a social science.
- In History, the techniques used by Scientists to analyse and explore evidence to establish facts were discussed.
Tenner Challenge
As part of our STEM enrichment, the Business Studies students took part in in the ‘10XChallenge’, a national competition for young people aged from 11 – 19 years. The competition, developed by Young Enterprise is one of the UK’s leading enterprise and financial education charities.
Business students in Year 10 and 12 took part in the challenge to develop their financial literacy, confidence and understanding of Business concepts in a real world setting.
Students spent three weeks planning and developing their enterprise by working in teams mostly in their free time to set up their business idea. Students applied their understanding of Business as taught within their curriculum subject to carry out market research and gained first-hand experience of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. The most successful teams were those that listened to the needs of their potential customers and tried to develop a business that customers would be interested in.
The ‘10XChallenge’ trade week took place nationally from Monday 21st March to Friday 25th March. During this week students across the country worked as a team to sell their experiences or products to students at lunch times. Students were initially lent £10 to help get their enterprise off the ground and all teams were then required to pay back the money loaned, work out their outgoing costs and establish how much profit each team made. The winning team is the team that made the most profit during the trade week. All money raised by all teams is planned to be reinvested on further enrichment projects for Business students involved.
We thank all staff and students involved in making the week successful.
Cyber First Competition
In February, four Copthall students made it to the national finals of the Cyber First competition hosed by the National Cyber Security Centre. The completion aims to give girls the opportunity to discover the exciting world of cyber security and win prizes along the way.
This year our students made it to the national finals and were able to meet Cyber Security analysts and professionals working at Amazon’s AWS centre that was hosting the event.
