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Recently, a group of ten Year 12 physicists from Westminster City School were invited to Imperial College to participate in a summer school with the physics department. Students were able to carry out small research projects at a world-class research institution, meet subject experts and undergraduate students in their fields and had a taste of what it might look like to study STEM subjects at a leading university.

Dr Webster, Lead Practitioner of Physics at Westminster City School, was involved in the summer school that took place across four days at Imperial College. She said:

“It was definitely a great opportunity for our students to be involved in something like this. They attended lectures about the physics behind simple harmonic oscillators and learned how to analyse data using Python. Afterwards they also completed several experiments, undergraduate level data analysis and computational modelling of oscillator systems.  It was also good that they were able to present their research to an audience of academics, Imperial undergraduates, students, and were ranked 5th out of the ten schools in the presentation competition which was an excellent result for a strong field.”

When asked what they'd enjoyed about the summer school programme, Year 12 student Adina, said:

“I really enjoyed the freedom of the experiments and learning to think like a scientist. Even if the experiments themselves were not challenging, collecting valid data and conducting the experiment in a way that reduces uncertainties, as well as analysing the data afterwards was fun.”

Kavitharen, commented on the most interesting aspect of the summer school, saying:

“The most interesting thing I learned over the summer school was the link between physics & computer science, where the results we obtained from the experiments we conducted could be plotted into a graph using coding, which was extremely challenging as coding was still a new area of study for me.”

A huge well done to all the students who participated!