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RAF - Roadshow

Students attended a STEM RAF Roadshow

I am very fortunate to be able to go on this amazing trip and listen to Professor Marcus Miodownik of University College London talk about why materials matter. Firstly, Professor Miodownik talked about how materials matter and that without it we would still be in the Stone Age. It was because of flint producing fire and from that the melting of stone that then we got copper and combine it with some other materials the Bronze Age started.

 

Next, he talked about how important glass is. I never thought that glass could have done so much. It was used to make microscopes, telescopes and glasses. Without these our generation wouldn’t of moved on and that we wouldn’t have got to know about the Solar System and that we had tiny creatures crawling all over us. This discovery of producing glass has enabled every other advancement in Engineering and Science

 

But he said that all of these materials wouldn’t have been used if it was not because of all the amazing and intelligent scientists. Then he moved on to the future and that the future is going to be really developed as we are staring to invent amazing things such as invisible cloak, artificial intelligence things and self-healing materials. This could solve the solution to sea levels rising and global-warming. But he said that it’s up to us (the children) to do this as we are still young and we have the opportunity to learn these things and develop our knowledge and invent these things.


The really interesting areas of Science at the moment is using STEM cells and fibres to grow bones and hopefully organs. We also learned about self-healing buildings by using bacteria and a food in them to heal the damage as the bacteria excrete calcite which fills the cracks.

 

Professor Miodownik said that if we want to follow these kind of paths then we need to actually want to help humanity. If you don’t want to help people then you might as well not follow the path of what he is doing.

 

Yuxing Weng

Year 8 student