Busy afternoon ahead

Around a month ago, we got an email asking if we could come up with something to occupy 13 children who are coming to the college today to try for an academic scholarship. They'll have a day of tests and then we are supposed to keep them entertained for an hour. My HoD cheerily said yes, and then promptly forgot about it until yesterday!

Since this is now going to be a rather last minute event, I foolishly thought we'd do something simple. After all we don't know the students involved, althoough as they are scholarship candidates they must be pretty bright. Also they have never used our equipment before. HoD however had grander plans. He insisted that the activity for them had to involve dataloggers so we can show off just how technologically advanced we are. This could cause problems on its own. There are a wide variety of dataloggers used in schools and the ones we have are certainly not the most popular, so if the students have used dataloggers before they may well not be familiar with the ones we have. Of course, they may not have ever come across dataloggers at all.

So use of the equipment might prove to be an issue, but at least they'll all be doing the same thing right? Wrong!

HoD has decided on a circus of experiments. Each pair of students will have a different experiment to carry out, two with light gates, two with temperature probes, one with a position sensor and one with a light sensor.

 Apparently he also wants to take them to see the observatory.

All in the space of an hour.

It's going to be an interesting afternoon.

Visitor from Rome, part 2

As expected, Brother Guy's lecture last night was awesome.

He talked about ideas in astronomy that were almost right, but ultimately ended up being totally wrong. He covered Ptolemy, Copernicus, my favourite astronomer Tycho Brahe and even his own master thesis from 1975 which was a study of Jupiter's moon Europa.

He's a really interesting and entertaining speaker and I think the students got a lot out of it.

A visit from Rome

Brother Guy has come to visit the school for a few days and is giving a lecture tonight on astronomy which should be really good.

I should mention at this point that I am not religious. I've no problem with people who want to believe in God, but personally I don't.
That being said, I'm finding it hard to understand the fuss everyone is making. The school chaplain is practically soiling his cassock with excitement that we've got a visitor from the Vatican and teachers are planning 'special' lessons for Br Guy to watch.

Why??

Ok, so he's a Jesuit who works for the Vatican, but ultimately he's a scientist and a really nice bloke. When we met him in Rome back in april he was great fun to spend time with and remarkably unpreachy. The way everyone is carrying on, you'd think that God himself had climbed down off his magic cloud to pay us a visit, or at the very least that the Pope had decided to pop in..

Never mind, they'll get over it. In the meantime I am really looking forward to tonight's lecture. :)