Week 3 – Baileys Court Primary School Scientists working with UWE

For this week’s update we were pleased to hear from two year 5 pupils – Tomasina & Bethan, who has written their own report of the weeks activities:

“This week, we’ve accomplished a lot in our weekly science lesson with UWE (University of the West of England).

Firstly, we read a voltage reading from our microbial fuel cells (MFC’s). Then, we agitated (mixed up) the mud inside the MFC’s. We then took another voltage reading. The results were interesting.Secondly, we sucked up the muddy water using a syringe. After that, we fed sodium acetate to our microbial fuel cells.

Now came the fun part! We each had a petri-dish that had a special type of jelly in it called agar. We had to press our fingers gently into the agar to see how clean our hands were. After a few seconds, we took our fingers out of the agar and shut the lid quickly. Debbie told us we could see the bacteria in next week’s lesson. She also said that she would take them to UWE to incubate. After we’d done that, we thought of places which were clean and dirty around the school. We used swabs and new petri dishes to collect the bacteria. We went around in different places (e.g. the staffroom, the kitchen, door handles, sinks, computer keyboards, a piano and more areas.). When we got to specific area, we used our swabs to collect the bacteria. Then we opened the lid of the petri dish and gently smeared an S onto the surface of the agar. We had been told to shut the lid quickly otherwise other bacteria would float up and land on the agar. We did this in two areas then went back to the classroom.

We discussed what we did in the afternoon. It was really fun, and we enjoyed it.”  

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