STEM careers for our Year 6 stars
On Wednesday 28 September our current Year 6 girls attended three STEM themed careers sessions at the Senior School as part of a transition programme to help them become more familiar with the Senior School ahead of joining Year 7 next year. The sessions were hosted by our Careers department and Mrs Kate Mead, Head of Careers, kicked off the event by asking the group whether they had any ideas about what they might like to do after they leave school. A number of the girls volunteered their ambitions, which ranged from becoming heart surgeons, veterinarians and horse riders; to actors, sports teachers, and illustrators; and engineers, mathematicians and even one astronomer!
The last of these girls found themselves in especially good fortune for the three careers sessions, as these were: Mathematics in astronomy; Mathematics in meteorology; and Computer Science. In the astronomy session, the girls learned that conversations about the planets, stars and galaxies are made much simpler through using the ‘standard form’. The girls worked out how many zeros were needed to write ‘150,000 million’ (distance from the earth to the sun in metres), ‘one trillion’ (the number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy) and ’10 billion’ (as a supernova shines with the brightness of 10 billion suns), and, working with up to 12 zeros per number, realised the need for standard form – for instance, one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) can be more easily represented with 10¹².
In the following session, on meteorology, the girls similarly spent time learning about decimals and percentages, and how to analyse and present data in order to make predictions – for instance about the weather. The girls practised picking out trends from data sets and observed that it was much easier to represent findings in graphs rather than tables.
In the Computer Science session the Year 6 pupils thought about how 'Computer Science is changing everything', from agriculture and fashion to safety and law enforcement, and art and design to medicine. They had the opportunity to try coding for themselves and, using the Hour of Code website, they chose whether to code a Minecraft Adventure, build a Star Wars game or help Anna and Elsa from Frozen to navigate an ice world using code. The girls saw how important women are in Computer Science and received a certificate and sticker for taking up the challenge to complete an hour of coding. They all thoroughly enjoyed the challenge, so much so that often the only sounds heard as they were engrossed in concentration were whoops of excitement as they completed a coding task.
