Science News
Science Week
A calendar often holds the dates of some very special days that you'd otherwise forget. An average calendar probably contains plenty of birthdays, important meetings and public holidays but here at Nossal, a special five days are highlighted by all staff and students. Coloured in bright Muji ink, the days from 17 to the 21 August are arguably the most anticipated days of the school calendar. Yes, that's right; it is the magnificent Science Week.
In 2020, Ms Mandeltort and the Science Leaders delivered a smoothly run program featuring a science modelling competition, science meme contest, Kahoot competition and blog launch. From the safety of your homes, please give a huge round of applause for Amy Chu, Deetya Kannan, Jazlyn Yap, Jennifer Ding and Rasna Prenan for their outstanding work.
Prior to Science Week, Jazlyn and I worked on creating a science blog with summarised information that could easily be consumed by the school community. Jazlyn sourced the interesting blogs, read through them and summarised them neatly. My job was simply to format the summarised blogs in an engaging manner and release them on the blog. The blog was launched on Friday and can be accessed from the list of links below.
The science modelling competition was an opportunity for students their passion and talent by proposing a solution to one of our generation's greatest challenges. The participants dealt with the theme of 'Deep Blue' to tackle problems regarding our oceans and submitted a short video explaining their potentially revolutionary model. Ayden, Hritik and Hadar won the competition for their impressive 'Marine Power Tower' but also massive congratulations to the runner-up, Harvey Lam, for their idea on alleviating pollution in our oceans.
It is no secret that the children of today enjoy nothing more than memes. During this year's Science Week, students submitted their own science memes in a fierce contest to find the highest quality OC (original content). Sadly, the Padlet was filled with reposts, however, whilst some may have found it disappointing, the majority of participants enjoyed what they saw and voted for their favourite memes. The unofficial winner of the competition received 26 votes; a chuckle-worthy reaction meme featuring Ned from Avenger's Infinity War posted by an anonymous person. However, the official winner of the 2020 Science Meme Competition is Farhan Andalib who posted an ambitious meme featuring several reaction memes.
It is also widely accepted that teachers of yesterday teach with textbooks whereas teachers of today teach with Kahoot. Aside from the competitive nature of classroom Kahoots, Nossal students also thoroughly enjoy the excitement of whole-school Kahoots. To end the amazing week, the Science leaders hosted an online Kahoot at lunchtime and in an exciting turn of events, James Madrisa came in first with Kai Ng and Jahanvi Shah tied in second, closely followed by Audrey Chau in the third position. Congratulations to all!
Once again, thank you to all the Science Leaders for their hard work; thank you to Ms Mandeltort for leading this program and thank you to all the participants. I hope you have Science Week already shaded in on your 2021 calendar :)
Links:
Science Blog: https://gottalovescienceaye.weebly.com/
Science Models: https://padlet.com/pre00062/r7zuo0m0mbhuobwn
Science Memes: https://padlet.com/yap0009/n0q9n67zx81io8xq
Nam Nguyen
Year 11
