What primary school experiences have influenced them wanting to become scientists?

I can... remember doing one experiment… we went out into the playground and we dug some earth, and we put it into a glass container with some water. And then the teacher shook it all up and left it to settle, and, of course, what we found was that the heavy particles, like, the big lumps settle first, and then… the medium size, and then, over quite a long time… the fine stuff really settled… and I remember… it was quite an interesting experiment… I hadn’t realised… that the big particles would settle so much faster than the smaller particles.

So it was... one of these 15-minute slots of science for schools on the radio… they would go through this… every week there was a little activity... At the end of the week they would tell you what to bring for the next week. … I can remember I was the only kid… who brought the things and sat and did it with them.

…we did a little lot project in our final year of primary school… it was quite independent… I did a project on electricity… I did a little experiment... I had a jam jar and two electrodes… the water went a bit green… I wrote this really long report, but I remember really getting into it… they [teacher and dad] generally wouldn’t help- they wouldn’t come and say, “Right, let me do that for you,’ but if I asked them, yeah.

…we did things with magnets… you had like the shavings and they would all get sucked in, which is… kind of surprising and cool for a… six or seven-year-old… I think I was… “How is that happening?” and so on…

I remember a few experiments that we did... I remember being very surprised that margarine floated… someone put a blob of either margarine or lard into water... I remember that very distinctly… I thought it would sink, you know? It meant it was something that I didn’t understand.