Foreword by Mr Badham: Today’s blog has been written by Georgia, one of our triple scientists, and is the first in a series of instalments written by our fantastic Scientists at The Holmesdale School.

For the past 6 weeks every Saturday members from three different schools were attending Canterbury university. We were given a taste of university life, had the opportunity to be rewarded a Crest award (A nationally recognised qualification) and to just have a good time.

Over the 6 weeks we had a number of lectures presented to us based on topics we later made a project on. For example we made a model of a robotic fish as our prototype. We were given some topics from the previous lectures, we then had to choose one of the topics and base a ‘big question’ on the topic.

For example, our group chose the question ‘how can we discover further into the depths of the ocean?’. We then had to make a model and academic poster to present and explain our ideas. We made a model of a fish to represent the robotic fish we would send to the bottom of the ocean. We attached a waterproof camera to the top so we could record footage under the water.

We also made an academic poster explaining our ideas for the fish and previous ideas others have had. To get the crest award we had to fill out a booklet based on our project. We had to mention things such as what went wrong, what we changed, all of our research and our final result. Parents were then given the opportunity to come and see what we had been doing over the past 6 weeks.

We then learnt the new skill of presenting to an audience as we had to show our project to parents. I found presenting easy as I have a lot of confidence however everyone there, including the not so confident, presented formally. The thing I enjoyed most was the tour of the campus where we went and saw the biology labs and technology departments. I would strongly recommend this experience if you are given the opportunity because it is such a good experience, especially if you want to go to university, and you learn so much.