Stellar space fun for Oakwood School pupils
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They enjoyed a whole day of space related activities.
Wearing space-themed fancy dress, pupils and staff at the Chichester Prep school designed and built rockets, learnt about the Rosetta programme, enjoyed a fascinating talk by a space engineer who himself worked on the Rosetta probe, created models of the solar system and discovered all sorts of exciting facts about shooting stars.
The run-up to the day saw a Facebook competition called ‘Guess the Spaceman’ in which pupils had to guess the identities of real European astronauts who kindly agreed to be photographed holding Oakwood Space Day posters.
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Hide AdThe answer to one of the ‘Guess the Spaceman’ questions was German astronaut Thomas Reiter.
The day itself was started with a personal video message from astronaut Tim Peake.
Andrew Knight, a space engineer with may years’ experience, gave talks to the pupils and was very impressed with the level of interest and knowledge shown.
He said: “Some questions were really insightful.
“A younger boy asked me ‘how can the universe explode if there is nothing there to start with?’ and questions designed to make the children think about our Solar System, for example ‘how come all the gas planets are far from the sun’ were answered, in this case by someone who was probably no higher than year three and got it bang on.
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Hide Ad“It’s quite something when children as young as that are able to follow the logic of how we were able to postulate the Big Bang and then test it.”
World Space Week is observed from October 4 to 10, and is officially defined as “an international celebration of science and technology, and their contribution to the betterment of the human condition.” It is an international celebration of science and technology, and their contribution to the betterment of the human condition.
Find out more at www.worldspaceweek.org.
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