OMA Fellows contribute to Accelerator Experience Days

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The Cockcroft Institute in Daresbury, UK, was recently overrun by 70+ school children (or future scientists) for the outreach Accelerator Experience Days. Several volunteers, amongst them OMA Fellows Ewa Oponowicz and Jacinta Yap, created an exciting and challenging day for the 12-15 year olds in an effort to encourage the pursuit of science as a career choice. With stimulated participation from local schools, the team of volunteers successfully managed to pique the interest of their junior guests and hopefully awaken some of their inner physicists.

Ewa explaining how to make a homemade salad bowl accelerator.

The students spent some time listening to an introductory talk, discussing the work of CI scientists presented in a form of posters and watching planned demonstrations of various experiments. However, the majority of the day was spent challenging them to create their own. In a mad flurry of masking tape, magnets, batteries and salad bowls, the students excitedly worked in groups with the volunteers to prove themselves as capable young physicists. As the students enjoyed building homemade salad bowl accelerators, Van De Graaff Generators and railguns, several students were also tasked with both filming and editing videos documenting their experiments and the process of making them.

Jacinta supervising the experiment.

Each day ended with vibrancy as the students displayed posters and videos detailing and demonstrating their work on the experiments. The videos displayed the students success, creativity (and a sense of humour), which left the students, teachers and volunteers in high spirits at the end of the day.