STEM club is an extra-curricular science club available for Y7 and Y8 (KS3) pupils and it runs on a Wednesday after school in D1, run by Mr.Green and Mr.Barron. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths and STEM club helps us all to gain extra knowledge of these things whilst carrying out fun and engaging experiments.

Lots of our exciting experiments and projects include: Parachute building and testing (from the top floor), slime making, methane bubbles (which we scooped up onto our hands, set on fire and watched the flames go), burning jelly babies to make them scream and lots more. We do different things each week and we also go on various trips.

Last year, everyone in STEM club was invited to the Flash bang Show where we went to watch lots of different experiments (which were too dangerous to do in school) carried out by professionals, at Bolton School.

Later on in the year, we built a complex robot which we managed to drive ourselves- using a controller. A selected few of us took our robot to the VEX IQ competition where we had to use our robot to compete in obstacle, point-scoring challenges.

In the competition, we came 1st out of around 8 schools/teams and we all got medals and a group trophy. This year, we are hoping to go back to another, different VEX IQ competition, once we have updated and made our robot better (hopefully using sensors, this time)!

Abigail Carr

Year 8