Registration is now open for our October Half-Term Camp.
Join us as we select the best hands-on activities and experiments from our Modules, and then make the most of the free time children finally have to take it all to the next level!
The camp is suitable for children aged 5 to 12, with both morning and afternoon sessions available.
And if you book before the 1st of October using the code OHT10, you will get an additional 10% off the week!
SCIENCE BEHIND THE WAND
Arguably, the most famous spell is Wingardium Leviosa (that’s leviosa, not leviosaaa!), and it’s one that science has well and truly covered. Electricity and magnetism have been making objects levitate long before Dumbledore grew the first hair on his chin. After swapping Hermione’s feather for our own flying teabags, we will use the power of electrons to levitate plastic at the behest of our static wands. But just as like charges repel, like poles do too, and magnetic levitation can be orders of magnitude more powerful, lifting whole trains off their tracks. So, we will summon up this force to hover magnets and bolts, pencils and brooms in nothing but thin air!
MYTH BUSTERS
Would we really sink in quicksand? And if yes, is it actually dangerous? What even is quicksand?! When water-saturated sand is agitated, once solid ground can quickly turn surprisingly liquid. By making it for ourselves, we will witness the dangers of liquefaction as it sinks objects and settles the first of our myths. But to answer the second, we will need to get dense! By pouring and floating different liquids atop one another, we will explore density and buoyancy until we are confident that quicksand won’t pull us down to the bottom any time soon (just don’t panic!). While some would love the chance to test this with real-life quicksand, the higher insurance premiums would hardly be worth it. So, we will pump air rather than water through fine sand to give you the next best thing - fluid sand!
PERIODIC PIONEERS
Categories help us make sense of the world, but nature doesn’t always play ball. Solids, liquids, and gases may seem like useful ways to describe materials until you meet materials that don’t fit neatly into either group. And elements can be just as rebellious! Chemists would like to divide them into metals and non-metals, but then came the metalloids, which were a little bit of both. This week, we will use boron, the lightest of these metalloids, to make a material that blurs the line between solid and liquid. Using the boron in household Borax powder, we will link PVA glue’s long-chain molecules together to turn it into slime. But what strength of borax solution makes the stretchiest of slimes? That’s a question our chemists will answer for themselves after the slimiest of experiments!
