Positive Chemical Reaction

During the summer holidays, Maria Young and I did something slightly unusual. We spent three days at the University of York doing Chemistry. The Salters’ Institute organises these camps for Year 10 students every summer at top universities all over the country.

By the time we met everyone else on the camp, no one was talking. We’d all psyched ourselves out about doing chemistry, to the extent that no one dared to talk.  This was rectified when we sorted into groups and paired up with total strangers, and communication became necessary in order to avoid spilling acid on unsuspecting parties. The lead teacher on the course, Ged, wasn’t at all the brooding professor that I had slightly expected, but rather a jovial Scottish man with chunky glasses and a liking for Frisbee and bad jokes, and our other teachers all managed to make the science interesting.

The day was divided up into lectures and practicals. These were unlike anything you would do at school, because we had access to different technology and we had so much more time. The practicals ranged from making an LCD display to working out which of four tablets contained a poison, and we then followed these up with lectures about material science and development of liquid crystals.

We had all got over our fear of speaking by the afternoon of the first day, and inevitably started to split into groups, often based on things like which person knew their way to the lunch hall, or whose friend had been paired with whose in a practical. When it came to our free time, it was usually spent hanging out in someone’s room (although not with the boys; the camp supervisors had put them in a different college dorm), drinking hot chocolate by the labs and getting lost. We also had some activities scheduled, including a ghost walk, a ‘pub/chemistry’ quiz, and a sports day. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the sport was not an unqualified success, except for a few people with actual hand-eye coordination skills.  The other activities went slightly more smoothly.

I would recommend this to anyone in Year 10 remotely interested in Chemistry. It was interesting, enjoyable, the other people there were great and there were HobNobs provided at regular intervals. What more could you ask for?

Gemma Wells, Year 10