Mysterious Materials at Cheltenham Science Festival

For the third year running we ran our Mysterious Materials workshops at the Cheltenham Science Festival to four groups of 30 KS2 and KS3 pupils.

Chris Hamlett introduced the audience to materials science before they visited four stand at which Discover Material Ambassadors helped them to investigated a range of materials properties.

The pupils learned about wettability (why surface roughness is needed to make surface superhydrophobic), smashed chocolate bars and stretched sweets to investigate mechanical properties and used UV colour changing beads to investigate the UV blocking power of a range of materials (to work out which materials would be best to use as a ski visor).

After their investigations the pupils retook their seats before using clicker buttons to answer a series of questions on what they had learned in order to generate a code to open a locked box full of goodies for them to share.

We really enjoy running this work shop and very much hope to be back at Cheltenham Science Festival with Royce again next year.