Chemistry OutReach at ScienceX

Chemistry in the real world 14 March 2019

Sarah, one of the many students who participates regularly in Chemistry OutReach, talks to us about their upcoming event at ScienceX. The students involved in Outreach present workshops to primary and secondary school children to engage the next generation of Chemists.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

 Hi, I’m Sarah, a 3rd year MChem student in my 4th year at Uni after completing foundation year!

I’m from Barnsley, near Sheffield & interests include playing video and board games, and exploring new towns and cities.

 Can you tell us a about ScienceX and what you will be doing there?

The ScienceX festival is an opportunity to inspire young people with the possibilities of Science an engineering in unexpected ways. It’s a free event taking over the Trafford shopping centre this weekend (9th and 10th March) which is fully run by volunteers from the University of Manchester. Well over 100 students will be encouraging the public to get involved and experience some science.

 Our team will be introducing the concept of density to young children by demonstrating it with some experiments they can recreate at home. Density can be difficult for people to understand without visual representation so these experiments focus heavily on that! We ran similar experiments at the Manchester Science festival last year; allowing children to create mocktails or lava lamps by layering liquids of different densities! For the particularly invested children we used this as a segway to briefly talk about different plastic densities and how these differences can be used to separate and recycling them. 

How/why did you get involved with Science outreach here at the school of Chemistry?

The Chemistry Department has many Outreach opportunities through the year! At the beginning of the year you can opt into a mailing list where you can receive several emails every week for new opportunists. I only began my outreach journey in 2nd year but I wish I started sooner! Since then I have gained so many valuable skills and spoken to and worked with so many interesting people. I would particularly recommend getting involved with these events if you are considering teaching, it is a very rewarding way to spend your time and it can leave a big impact on the people you speak to! When I was in secondary school I never knew what job to get after education or subject to study at A-Level, but a similar sort of event persuaded me to pursue studying science and so hopefully I can return the favour to someone else!

Thanks Sarah for giving us an insight into your work with Outreach! If you want to find out anything more about Outreach at the School of Chemistry, please email outreach.chemistry@manchester.ac.uk.