Year 9 STEM Taster Days
A piece of Cornish rock inside a tabletop cloud chamber. Did you know that the radiation dose from living in Cornwall is ~3 times the national average. Can you identify the particle tracks?
At beginning of January, amongst the cold, snow, and ice, members of the Department of Physics and the Faculty of Science and Engineering battled against the elements to make it on to campus. They delivered hands-on practical physics sessions to over 100 year 9 students (those whose buses had managed to make past the school gates that morning) as part of the Year 9 STEM taster days organised by the School of Physical Sciences outreach team.
Two sessions were delivered by Physics: our brand-new workshop ’Radiation: What has it ever done for us?’ by Ellis Rintoul and ‘Light up the World’ by Sarah Annand and Jen Bullock. They were supported by Charlie Devlin, PhD students Tom Wonderley, Tom Gallagher, Sophie Gresty and Dominic Wearne, and undergraduate students Louise Luker, Habiba Khanom, and Valerie Parocki.
In Radiation: What has it ever done for us? students used CTL radiation detectors, cloud chambers, and rocks to discover sources of radiation that exist around us as well as their uses in society. They were surprised to find that out of a radium watch, uranium glass, radioactive rocks, and a common household smoke alarm, that the most radioactive of these items was the smoke alarm.