STEM Week Round up - Ms. Moore | Willow Park Junior school

The STEM week activities involved 23 presentations/workshops delivered throughout the school from parents and volunteers working within STEAM careers.

See the themes below:

2^nd Form - “Emerging Infectious Diseases as a Result of Global Warming” Philip Noone – Biotech
1^st Form – Slime making workshop with Junior Einstein’s and they made an ‘external combustion engine’ with Vance Harris
4^th Form - Aoife Ahern 3D printing UCD
Senior Infants – Dublin Fire Brigade
6^th Form – Introduction to coding and Micro-bits – Microsoft

In addition to lots of visitors, each class got to visit the planetarium which was set up in the gym. The boys also visited the hub area, where 20 transition year students from Blackrock College and 3 Transition year students from Loreto Foxrock led 10 science experiments. Dr Siun Murphy kindly set up a medical stand which was operational all week during the hub visits.

The experiments were:

Bubble snakes
Scared pepper
Jelly and oil (using chopsticks)
Bernoulli’s principle (flight)
Lenz’s Law
Boat powered by chemical reaction
Invisible ink
Coding – iPads
Lava lamps
Dancing raisins

See the Science behind each experiment

The theme of STEM week was ‘Up and Away’ to commemorate the first moon landing 50 years ago. We had links to many Irish scientists and the boys completed Space Art in their classrooms which were displayed around the school. We had an opening ceremony were our choir sang ‘Star Man’ David Bowie and our two Intel Mini-Scientist winners presented the App that they created to aid recycling.

View the Opening Ceremony:

5^th and 6^th – Just Add Water! (Water conservation – this links heavily with our Spiritan Trust) The boys started off learning about the water cycle and will engage in social justice activities including the conservation of water in school/at home and a beach clean-up in collaboration with Willow Senior. The theme of the Developmental Education project this year is ‘Regeneration’