November 2013 – Forensics
November is another busy month for us here at Breadalbane. We are really getting into the swing of our project for the Rolls-Royce Science prize. We have been continuing to apply knowledge from our visits in the classroom and we have now started to expand the project beyond our original brief to include further scientific industries – this month we are looking at the forensic and analytical industries. In addition to this, what has been really encouraging has been the fact that other subjects have also seen the merit in teaching by this type of method and are beginning to join into the project.
This month we have had a talk by experts from the forensic laboratory in Aberdeen and a visit to the analytical labs in Napier University to see how materials are tested. Students here were looking at different types of materials and how to examine their properties. The visit included looking at NMR, electron microscopy and mechanical testing. These visits and talks are hugely interesting and show how widely used analytical chemistry is. Staff members also found them useful and intend to bring back ideas from these visits into everyday lessons. We have been lucky enough to borrow an infra-red and ultra-violet spectrometer from the Royal Society of chemistry this month and the follow up in the classroom is using these machines to forensically investigate the contents of common products. These have included looking at aftershave, aspirin and paracetamol. This has proved a really useful exercise and really has expanded our students’ ideas of what chemistry is used for and hopefully will give them a greater range of options for their future careers. We will continue with a range of forensic and analytical activities in the next few months.
We have also continued expanding upon our visit to the distillery and are now coming to the end of the range of activities. In previous months, we have produced fermenters and stills, made alcohol and investigated enzymes. We have also previously compared fermentation with hydration as a method of production and completed both in the classroom. The last section that we have looked at linked to this topic has been some of the reactions of alcohols. My first look over what the pupils have learnt has been very encouraging – we evaluated their responses to what they had learnt and they were great – the understanding shown was high and, I believe, much beyond what I normally would expect.
We have also continued to build on our visit to the gold mine by looking at how gold and other metals are produced from their ores using reduction and oxidation. Our building of test plants on this topic will begin next month.
As mentioned earlier, other subjects are now starting to come on board with this manner of application-led teaching. Biology had a visit to a local university to learn about amplifying DNA and then came back to school and used electrophoresis and other techniques to visualise the DNA that they had amplified. Physics had a talk from a lecturer in aeronautical engineering and then completed a project on building gliders.
In conclusion, our initial evaluations of the project have been very encouraging and we are now spreading our wings to further industries and getting other subjects to join in the project.
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