APOTHECARY BEES
Participants learn about pollen, bees, and other pollinators, honey, DNA and antibiotic resistance and perform an agar diffusion assay with their own honey samples. In Year 8 our participants then progress onto becoming “Honey detectives” and visit the university to investigate pollen samples using microscopy and explore DNA isolation and analysis techniques and visit the Cardiff University beehives. In Year 9 our participants will be exploring how to isolate antibacterial compounds from plants.
CHEMISTRY IN THE 3RD DIMENSION
Chemistry in the 3rd Dimension combines computational chemistry with state-of-the-art 3D projection to enable pupils to “step inside” chemical systems to understand the processes taking place which govern chemical reactivity. Using talks, visualisation sessions and tutorial and problems solving sessions, students explore topics such as “Introduction to computational chemistry and modelling”, “Environmental chemistry, pollution and greenhouse gases”, “The Chemistry of health, medicines and nutrition” and “Exploring Plastics and their Environmental Impact”.
UNIVERSELAB
UniverseLab gives participants the opportunity to explore all things astronomy and space-related. Students will work with Faulkes Telescope Project, allowing them access to remotely-controlled telescopes around the globe, and work with partner projects AstroCymru, QuarkNet Cymru and Down2Earth (with National Museum of Wales). In Year 7 “Our Place in Space” revises solar system knowledge from KS2 and introduces participants to innovative technology, 3D, virtual reality, augmented reality and robotic telescopes. In Year 8 “Death, Destruction and Dinosaurs” allows participants to plan, capture and study their own telescope images to identify moving objects (asteroids/comets), learn about meteorites and extinction event impacts using hand-specimens, online simulators and VR. In Year 9 our participants experience our “Seeing Stars” programme where they engage with the Gaia space mission, and specifically Gaia Alerts (Cambridge Uni), which discovers 2-4 new supernovae every day. Participants will obtain their own Gaia-captured space data in which they will search for objects that change in brightness, allowing them to potentially discover supernovae or other variable phenomena and participate in real-world research themselves.