GSS 2023

Celebrating science

This year’s theme is ‘Family: Connections’

Our seventh symposium continued to develop our science ambition, ensuring pupils had the chance to engage with science in innovative and thought provoking ways, starting with our Ask a Scientist event which can be viewed here.

We were excited to welcome our guest scientists for this event, and very grateful that they volunteered their valuable time in order to be grilled by our young Griffin scientist interviewers.

Our panel of experts this year were:

Dr Anne Edwards, a plant geneticist at the John Innes Centre, Norwich
Dr Raymond E. Arvidson, a member of the Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission science teams, and the Director Emeritus of the Geosciences Node of NASA’s Planetary Data System
Dr Alice Dunford, Ogden Outreach Officer, Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics, School of Physical Sciences at the Open University
Dr Lucy Foulston, Senior Director Microbial Engineering, Gingko Bioworks, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
PhD students

The GST theme this year is Family, with a further GSS focus on Connections, to expand on the Trust theme and encompass the theme for British Science Week (BSW) this year. The concepts work well together on a number of science-related levels.

The point is to encourage curiosity and creative thinking in our young Griffin Scientists; they are, after all, our hope for the future!

Inspiring Curiosity

We kicked off the week with our ‘Ask a Scientist’ interactive session that had some exciting guest speakers – experts in their field – who were interviewed by our young Griffin scientists about their careers, their particular specialism and what drives their curiosity.

GST Science Leads planned and delivered a vast range of activities and experiences for pupils, working with external speakers and visitors, as well as this all of Year 6 and Year 7 joined the live sessions led by Dr Alice Dunford from the Open University Science Outreach Team. The focus for the live sessions was on space exploration with students researching different aspects of this field in advance to be able to engage with and ask questions about the science at a sophisticated level.

BSW is producing activity packs for all key stages in collaboration with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and will be releasing details of the BSW poster competition in the near future. https://www.britishscienceweek.org/