Students at the summer school make their own t-shirts for the presentations
This summer, the physics department proudly hosted its long-running summer school programme for local Year 12 students. The week-long event welcomed some 40 enthusiastic students, many from under-represented backgrounds, offering them an immersive experience of work, study, and life in a physics department.
During the week the students work on a project, alongside a central programme of activities that includes departmental tours, career talks, and sample lectures. The projects and activities are organised into different streams, each focusing on a specific area of physics. These streams allow students to delve deeply into topics such as quantum technologies, a major stream sponsored by the National Quantum Computing Centre, and this year, a newly introduced climate science stream.
The climate science stream offered a unique opportunity for students to investigate the pressing issue of global warming. Over the course of the week, ten students in this track conducted hands-on experiments and attended seminars to explore the impact of human activities on climate change. The students began the week by tackling the question: climate change – how do we know it's happening and how do we know it's humans causing it?
Kristian Strommen, the senior post-doc who led the new climate stream of the programme, comments, 'These are obviously important questions, and scientists have worked for more than a hundred years to reach clear consensus on them. However, despite the fact that most people in the UK accept the scientific consensus, probably not many could answer these questions! In the summer school we wanted the students to gain an understanding of the techniques and methods that have been used to answer these questions, ranging from the collection of measurements of the atmosphere (like its temperature) to the use of theory and climate models to simulate a hypothetical world-without-humans.
'We also wanted to give the students a basic sense of how a lot of the theory of how the global climate system works can be understood using very familiar ideas: warm air rises, air flows from high pressure to low pressure, wind blows stuff around, and so on. Climate science became a lot more fun and accessible to me personally once I realised this, and it was great to see the student's excitement and engagement as they began appreciating this themselves!'
Edward Groot, who developed a new coding activity using real scientific data for the young people at the summer school, was encouraged to see the 'A-level students engage deeply with methods, tools, and, most importantly, explore them critically during the sessions—much like undergraduate and graduate students do in their courses'. In particular, he greatly appreciated witnessing 'their engagement reach a level where at least some became highly motivated to pursue future studies in climate science or environmental physics!'
The summer school is designed to help students explore physics-related careers and understand the next steps for continuing their passion in the field. Replacing traditional work experience, this programme allows students to work on specialised physics projects throughout the week. At the end of the week, they present their work to their peers in a poster presentation.
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