Question: when you are in schools how do you show kids in a variety of ages your work to make them interested in science?

Kate Dobson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

This is a good question. When I go into schools I tend to take some fairly simple props/experiments and lots of pictures, and start at the beginning.

What I generally find is that everyone can see and describe what is happening, the younger students just might not know enough to work out the details of why. That doesn’t mean they can’t understand it, you just might need to use different words or describe things in more general terms. So a “high pressure high temperature magma deformation experiment” being discussed with GCSE students would be “what happened when we take hot lava and squeeze it” to a P3 class.

Generally I get asked to give more of a talk and Q&A session when I talk to to older students – you often want to know things about how to get into a career in a certain area, or what it’s like to study at university, or what A levels should to do. It’s often as much about answering the questions as having a specific plan. There are some experiment though (the one with Mentos in diet coke etc) that are just cool what ever your age and however many times you see it.