Diary Entry - March

March has been an exciting Month for everyone at Exeter Road! 

On the 7th, the whole school from Year 2 to Year 6 set off for the Eden Project in Cornwall and, later in the month, the younger children spent a day at West Town Farm near Ide, in East Devon, (after a somewhat shorter coach journey)!  Both trips were made possible by funds from the Rolls Royce Science Prize along with a grant from the Exmouth Raleigh branch of the Rotary Club, and were our main events for this year’s National Science and Engineering Week.  Many children whose families might not otherwise have afforded such a trip were given the opportunity to experience all Eden has to offer.  In fact, only a small minority of children had ever visited Eden before.

The day was a huge success on so many levels: the weather was perfect (a bright Spring day without a cloud in the sky); the children were enthused about growing things, and learned a great deal about all that plants and plant-related products contribute to their lives; and, of course, we got to see the BIGGEST GREENHOUSE IN THE WORLD - its scale somewhat larger than the children’s own prototypes!  Bran Howell from Eden welcomed us with a specially-tailored introduction focusing on the design and construction of Eden and the materials used.  Then we split into twelve groups (twelve children in each) to explore Eden – joined by STEM Ambassador Rodney Battey, Stuart White and Don Buteux from the Rotary Club, Frances Pearce (our horticultural advisor) and Chris Adams (also from our Rolls Royce Project team) who managed to film the visit (even when his camera was steamed-up inside the Tropical Biome)!

The younger children enjoyed a similarly eventful and stimulating day at West Town Farm, where they planted seeds after digging and preparing the ground, peeled and cooked potatoes over an open fire and made vegetables from withies, and later walked a farm trail where they learned about caring for livestock.  Again, as Sara Lopez, our Year One teacher commented: “It was clearly a completely new experience for most of them”. 

Back at school, the Rolls-Royce Project Area has been completed, thanks to the efforts of TA Jean Betts.  On display for all visitors to the school to see are examples of the children’s designs and prototypes along with information about the Rolls-Royce Science Prize.  In classes, seeds have been sown.  Every class was given the same selection of equipment, purchased thanks to funding from our award: F1 hybrid seeds, trays and sowing compost.  This followed a mid-March planning meeting attended by all members of the Project Team and an invited guest: Dr. Nigel Skinner, Senior Lecturer in Science at Exeter University, who offered help – e.g. by lending the school an extra supply of data-loggers. 

Rosy Grant from the Soil Association gave the site a ‘once-over’ this month to suggest ways we might optimize what we can grow.  Children from the Green Team have continued to tidy and weed the pots and borders, as well as starting to dig a pond.  The new garden area has been used as a test bed for finished mini-greenhouse prototypes.  Our extremely keen, freshly-recruited and trained Camera Crew have been called on several times to film the experiments taking place there, such as wind resistance tests using a giant fan. 

From this particular experiment, the children soon discovered that some form of staking or weighting was essential if their greenhouses weren’t to blow away!  A rather less welcome (or controllable) factor has been the few regrettable acts of can or stone-throwing over the school fence.  As Rodney Battey sagely noted: ‘Young boys and greenhouses have long needed to be kept apart’!

However, thanks perhaps to a certain amount of testing for resistance to hail (we used gravel), footballs and basketballs, some of our prototypes have actually proved rather more robust than their glass equivalents might have done!  And a design has been chosen – in part owing to its robustness – to be scaled-up to a full-size version, as was the original intention of the project.  Three children in Year Three – Tegan, Emily and Klaudia – came up with a design based on squares made from old CD cases glued together with a hot-melt gun.  When they tested a 40cm x 40cm square panel made of 9 CD cases for the weight of snow it might be capable of supporting, the result was calculated to be 55cm(!) which was 10 times more snow than the children predicted might fall.  They did, however, notice a deflection in the panel, although they didn’t quite put it that way!  “It’s bending!” they said.  What’s more, the attraction of the CD case design is its ease of repair: a broken panel simply needs to be slipped out, and a new one slipped in.  Genius! – especially in an environment in which a full-size greenhouse must share a small space with flying footballs on a daily basis! Robin James. 

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