Year 10 students get scientific at the Royal Institution

On Wednesday 30 April, Year 10 students visited the L’Oreal Young Scientist Centre at the Royal Institution to take part in a workshop all about colour. This trip, funded by the Friends of Dulwich College, aimed to excite students about the future of their Science studies, and to encourage more to take up the Sciences at A level.

As students arrived at the laboratory they donned goggles, gloves and lab coats to prepare for an exciting day of extension beyond their GCSE curriculum. Students first learned about how animals see colour and what makes things colourful, thinking about both the physics of light and the biology of the eye. They then prepared natural and synthetic dyes and looked at how well these work on both natural and synthetic fabrics; a fantastic real-world link to Chemistry in the fabrics industry. Finally, students used colorimetry to work out the concentration of an unknown solution, a technique usually only covered at A level.

To round off the day, students were treated to a flame show where they saw how to create coloured flames and learned the secret to disappearing (and reappearing) ink using liquid nitrogen. Thanks go to the fantastic scientists at the Royal Institution who were a real inspiration.