I saw this advertised on the Lancashire Home Ed Facebook group and thought we’d give it a go. Lancaster University was where the Team Wint story began as this is where Dom and I met back in 1999. We jumped at the chance of returning to our younger days and showing the girls where we used to live and study.
The Physics day was held at Williamson Park, the highest point in Lancaster, with amazing views across to the coast. The day was run by physics students from the University who do outreach programmes to local schools; they were therefore very experienced at engaging the kids and making physics fun.
We spent a long time looking at a Van de Graaff generator and the student explained to us how it all worked. The girls even got to zap each other with electricity!
We then watched a presentation all about liquid nitrogen with lots of exciting experiments and audience participation. The presenters explained clearly what was happening and went into a lot of detail about the physics of it and how that could be applied to real life situations.
We didn’t get round all the stands as the girls needed feeding (Peggy was getting hangry) but we very much enjoyed what we saw and interacted with. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any other days like this and those run by other departments too. We live near a lot of universities but it’s never occurred to me to see if they offer any outreach programmes for under 16s. Now I know they’re a “thing”, I’m on it!
