RSC Schools' Analyst Competition 2023
Posted on: September 25th 2023School News
Earlier this year, five teams of three year 12 pupils took part in the RSC’s Schools' Analyst Competition 2023. The teams were tasked with finding out who was sabotaging entries at ‘The County Bake Off’. The competition kits allowed teams of three students to compete against each other in an analytical challenge focusing on finding out what was causing the buns to burst and the cakes to collapse. This challenge offered students the chance to apply their Chemistry knowledge in a fun and rewarding way. The teams worked together over lunch times to complete this challenge and got a lot out of this experience.
Thank you to the Royal Society of Chemistry for this opportunity and to Dr Graeme from Northumbria University for organising the challenges. The winning MGS team was: Vibhav, Nathan and Athish.
Nathan commented: “The RSC Young Analyst competition was an amazing opportunity to do fun lab work outside of lessons as a group, which has improved our individual skills, but also helped us learn how to divide tasks between us and work together to get the most out of the limited time we had in the lab each lunchtime. This is especially useful as group work under tight time constraints is something that will become very common as we go into university, so it has helped to prepare us in this way. After doing sessions once or twice a week for around 4 weeks, we managed to finish all of the Bake Off themed practicals and submitted our answers, achieving the first place prize at our school. There were another four teams who participated and two of them must also be commended for working so hard and managing to complete all of the work in time for the end of the competition. We all enjoy Chemistry or else we wouldn’t have entered, so this was a fantastic experience for all of us”.
Well done from everyone at MGS!