Anna Fisher, Learning Resources Project Coordinator, shares the latest news from the Building Bridges project.
An amazing VIP late-night event occurred at the Science Museum last week for students involved in the Building Bridges project. The students have been working with us all year and this special celebration was a chance for them to show off the work they have done to their families, and get involved in a variety of exciting activities such as extracting strawberry DNA, eating ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, testing their tolerance of chillies and getting creative with SM:Art Mechanics.
For the past three years the Building Bridges project has been working with schools across London and Reading to expose and engage students with science inside and outside the classroom, and at home with their families. All of the students involved have followed a year-long programme made up of Outreach shows, classroom resources, museum activities, workshops with research scientists and family activities.
The project hopes to use the new resources that have been developed to better engage families in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). All of the resources have been researched throughout the project and we hope that they will help support both informal and formal learning.
This year students have all worked really hard and contributed to their own exhibition, ‘Guardians of the Gallery’, which was showcased at the VIP event. This exhibition showcased objects that the students had chosen to represent how science and technology helps us to solve everyday problems. For example, a dress made from LEDs with a solar-powered handbag was chosen as something that you could wear to a VIP event, a self-driving car was the travel option of choice for one student working out how they were going to get to their holiday destination, and a daylight simulating lamp was suggested by one student as something that would help them get up early.
With the help of some incredible teachers, wonderful students and the helpful teams within our Learning department, the Building Bridges project has been able to develop and deliver a number of new, successful activities and events for this year’s programme. We are looking forward to meeting the students taking part in the project next year, and using the research findings to increase science engagement and literacy even further.
If you are looking for exciting activities for your family in the Museum head to our events calendar to see what’s on. The Learning team run fun free science shows in the Museum every day of the week, with extra workshops, storytelling, drama characters and family-friendly tours at weekends and during the school holidays.