The Abingdonian 2019

47 www.abingdon.org.uk Summer Term such as the humanities day, business challenge, fun with languages, mini- olympics, and DT outreach The best people to tell you about the impacts of ASiP events are our own students; below are insights from some of the boys who have got involved. Robin Southwell-Sander I was lucky enough to be involved with Abingdon Science Partnership for four years as a senior science ambassador. Taking on responsibility for organising the staffing of events with science ambassadors from across the school was a great way to improve my leadership skills; ASP also gave me opportunities to engage with science in the community, and I’ve learned skills that have had benefits for me both inside and outside the ASP context. Twice a month, I took part in Saturday Science Club, where we open the Yang Science Centre to groups of children aged 5-7 and their parents for fun and engaging introductions to different areas of science. This gave me the chance to improve my skills as a communicator, as I helped demonstrate science and manage large groups of youngsters. I’ve also had experience of communicating across all age groups of the local community, such as when I had the chance to design and run a “scale of the universe” demonstration for the Family Science Fair, part of the wider Atom Science Festival in which ASP was a leading partner, teaching parts of what I learned through my astronomy GCSE. Learning astronomy in collaboration with classmates from other local schools was a great way to meet new people and expand my knowledge of the workings of the universe (and I even got a qualification out of it), while teaching that knowledge to others was a very rewarding experience. Alasdair Czaplewski, 7JEF I made a wide range of rewarding contributions to the ASP this year. One of my main contributions to the partnership is leading the Primary Science Club, which is now running on a weekly basis due to the number of volunteers. This means we can alternate between planning and teaching. Each week, we run an experiment which our volunteers choose and design in order to ensure it is safe, fun and educational. Primary school students repeatedly give positive feedback about our experiments, and volunteers have said that they feel the sessions further their understanding of topics which they might not cover in their lessons at school. For our volunteers the experience has also been invaluable as there are so many roles which they can take. Developing leadership and team working skills is a clear benefit, but many volunteers have also said covering topics they are studying for their GCSEs has helped them revise the topic, as they clearly need to be able to understand it in order to teach it! I have also been working on a project supported by a Royal Partnership Grant given to ASP to design and exercise an experiment performing behaviour