As part of Science Week, St Stephen’s School Carramar proudly hosted its second Science Showcase. As the name suggests, the purpose of our Science Showcase event is to get the word out to our young people about the amazing work being done in Western Australia in collaboration with a global scientific community and what opportunities there are for employment in scientific work in the future. View full gallery here.
This year, by way of interpreting an intriguing and almost all-encompassing Science Week theme, “Decoding the Universe – Exploring the unknown with nature’s hidden language”, we chose to focus on the scale of the incomprehensibly large and the realm of the infinitesimally small. Namely, how do we decode and glean information from the Universe as a whole and how do we understand the language of life, encoded in the DNA molecule?
Our keynote speaker was Prof. Danail Obreschkow, who is an astrophysicist at the University of Western Australia (UWA) node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the Director of UWA’s International Space Centre (ISC). Prof Obreschkow’s talk took us on a journey from our home planet to the edge of the universe, illuminating our place in the cosmos and exploring recent discoveries, from interstellar comets and mysterious radio flashes to distant galaxies and beyond. The adventure concluded with a captivating plunge into a black hole!
In addition to our guest speaker, dedicated scientists such as Pauline Charman from BioBarcode Australia and a team from the Harry Butler Institute at Murdoch University, as well as our own dedicated Science teachers, ran hands-on workshops in the Science building.
Through hearing from our guest speaker as well as the science workshops, the aim of the evening was to entertain and amaze students and parents with the wonders of the Universe and inspire them to look up, look down, look around and get involved in Science.
Professor Obreschkow delivered a riveting and humorous presentation that emphasized the immensity of the Universe and the complexity within its structure. He brought home the fact that we and all life on Earth are made of the same “stuff” as the Universe at large and that stars are the forges of all the building blocks of life and matter.
Students and their parents then attended a Science workshop of their choosing. Extracting the DNA from strawberries proved very successful and people saw the “fruit” of their labour immediately, as cloudy clumps of white DNA rose up from their mixtures. This was very satisfying for the Science teachers, Mrs Smoker and Mrs Minchin who facilitated those workshops, as well as the participants.
The Breakout Box activity, facilitated by representatives from Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute, proved a popular activity, as brain power was pitted against persistent perseverance, using questions and clues about the wonders of the DNA molecule to break the codes into a box, waiting to reveal its secret.
The third workshop, presented by the BioBarcode Australia founder, Pauline Charman, was aimed at the older Biological Sciences students and put into practice the biotechnologies they have learned about in class, such as PCR and gel electrophoresis. This important work uses DNA visualisation to help identify as many species of plants, insects, and fungi as possible, contributing to a national citizen science effort to record biodiversity before some species are lost in Australia.
The evening not only celebrated scientific discovery but also inspired the next generation of innovators to explore the wonders of science. View full gallery here.