In the first week of the summer holiday LEH sent a delegate to the amazing South East London, Big Bang Fair. The organizers, STEM Learning, together with hosts Sutton Grammar School, put together an incredible event that we were delighted to attend. The venue was humming with activity, and was full of interactive exhibitions that ran all day. We could make newspaper as strong as steel, control our own robots, and find out about the underground world of mail rail. The workshops presented a great opportunity to chat with real Scientists and Engineers, and included a CSI challenge, animation creation, and robotics. There were also shows running a couple of times during the day, including the science of fireworks.

Last year at LEH a team of LVI Physics students worked on the cern@school project administered by the Institute for Research at Schools (IRIS). They used CERN technology to design and undertake their own experiments to investigate the levels of nuclear radiation emitted by mobile phone screens. This showed tremendous initiative and produced meaningful and original data. The team, consisting of Ellen (LVIE), Olivia (LVIB), Lizzie (LVIG), Anjuli (LVIH), Venice (LVIB) and Georgie (LVIA), all contributed to the planning, data collection, analysis and presentation of this highly collaborative enterprise.  Only Ellen, however, was available to present the findings at the Big Bang Fair. Incredibly, she also agreed to participate as a solo competitor in The Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Competition. Such an entry was never part of the cern@school mission statement, but Ellen was resolute. Accompanied by three display boards full of material, she presented and explained the LEH project to fair goers and endured two rounds of judging by the STEM Ambassadors. The cross questioning was intense, but Ellen displayed all of the attributes we associate with LEH students: resilience, intelligence, and confidence. This year we did not win the competition, but our scientists are amazing and will keep coming back stronger and more determined. Well done to Ellen and the whole cern@school team for being noble pioneers towards a new LEH Physics frontier!

By Mr Brittain – Teacher of Physics