25 May 2017
Lower Sixth Science Ambassadors were amongst the local professional and business people asked to present inspiring ideas and activities to children at Rush Common Primary School for their 2017 Ambitions Day. The boys joined dentists, lawyers, Microsoft engineers and volcanologists in presenting three workshops to children from foundation and Year 2 classes who were desperately keen to hear their presentation on 'How to be an Astronaut'. The children were particularly impressed to hear that three Abingdon boarders, Ivan Leung, Matthew Hung and Bill Li, had come all the way from China to talk to them about cosmic rays. The boys explained how these were little pieces of the Sun made from the tiny building blocks of matter, using LEGO bricks as a very useful analogy. Tom Preston and Joe O'Shea then described how astronauts train and how they survive in space, based on their own experiences at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre on the school trip to Russia last February. The children were then taken outside to launch stomp rockets, complete with noisy countdowns, and were also thrilled to experience the dramatic 'whoosh bottle' demo and the production of explosive hydrogen in a test tube. It was a real privilege to see our Science Ambassadors working alongside adult professionals and doing such an amazing job of inspiring local children to be excited by science and space exploration.
