Activities tagged performance
Come Make Some Noise!
07th February 2011
For our third project we aimed to discover the STEM behind sound, instruments and bands. To start off the project we all researched into harmonics, sound waves and the doppler effect. We were helped in all this by one of our physics teachers.
Our next session involved making instruments out of…
VEGETABLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We made a variety of instruments including a butternut squash drum, carrot flute, pepper shaker and a cauliflower trumpet. This involved drilling, carving and sticking mouthpieces into things. Overall, most of the instruments were successful but as you can probably guess, some of them looked more like we’d thrown it off a three storey building, dragged it through a hedge and played rugby with it. After this, we had to perform with our vegetables in front of all of our STEM club members and basically embarrassed ourselves quite a bit.
We were privileged enough to have two members of STOMP come to our school and run a workshop with us. We got to do a variety of things that STOMP do in their show. Plus we got to miss lessons :D
Then we started to collect together scrap that we would use to make stomp inspired instruments to use in our school’s musical. We used a variety of materials including Glass bottles, elastic bands, cardboard boxes and anything else we could get our hands on.
To end this project we went on a 2 day residential trip to London. We visited a variety of museums and attractions and concluded the trip with a performance by STOMP where we got to see the techniques we had learnt put into practise by the proffesionals.
By Alanna Duff, Ruby Tebbs and Elsie Powers
It's Magic!
31st January 2011
In October 2008 the brand new Friesland STEM Club opened it’s doors for the first time. We thought we would kick off the club with a bang and open up backstage, ready to learn the STEM behind Magic, Trickery and Illusion.Unsurprisingly with over 20 year 8 students in one room we produced some rather outrageous plans. So here’s how by the end of December we managed to conjure up Santa Claus, levitate an audience member and spear one of our smaller students through a box (Don’t worry she was fine).
First of all we researched a few famous faces in the magic industry and frantically tried to work out how the HECK they did that!!!!!!! Soon it became apparent that Google didn’t have all the answers and a real live magician had to be called in. He showed us a few of his own tricks which, we have to say, were pretty amazing. After that he told us how we could do our own tricks and we were very grateful for his advice. He also gave us our very own trick deck of cards and a collapsable magic wand.
Next, we had to prepare and rehearse our tricks. This involved us frantically running around the school and asking for help from many different departments. Technology were a great help to us and of all things they helped us to reinforce our magic box and to drill holes in hard boiled eggs!! We also had a lot of help from maths, science and art.
Before we knew it we were stood on stage in front of an expectant crowd of family and friends. First of all we performed our large tricks including (as mentioned earlier) a festive treat! We produced a student dressed as Santa Claus from a collection of beautifully wrapped cardboard boxes. Another trick involved a student correctly guessing the colour of a wax crayon (he was blind folded by the way :D). Next, we set up some stalls around the stage and the audience were given the opportunity to witness our magical abilities!
These smaller acts were mainly card tricks and optical illusions, but also some of our stranger creations. Overall, it was a great way to kick off the club and also gave us the chance to set the bar up high for our next performance.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid to say that we really can’t give too much away. The best magicians never reveal their secrets!
By Ruby Tebbs, Elsie Powers and Alanna Duff
CSI Friesland
07th February 2011
Our first project of Year nine was CSI friesland. We learnt all about forensic science and Crime Scene Analysis. Here’s how we did it.
We started by looking at our own fingerprints and trying to see all the different features. After this we took the entire group up to a science lab in the sixth form and looked at our hair under microscopes and let’s just say some hair definitely had not been washed! Also, we analysed some animal hairs and compared them to the human ones, unfortunately we had to inform one of the school teachers that her cat had fleas. Soon we moved to blood analysis and trying to determine blood types. Obviously we weren’t allowed to use real blood for hygiene purposes so Miss Shapland mixed us a strange concoction of chemicals, vinegar, blood and food colouring. Finally we learnt all about Entomology by trying to identify how long someone had been dead by looking at the bugs on them. Again, we didn’t take a quick a visit to the morgue and we didn’t borrow a real dead body, we just looked at photos and gathered information about the bugs to make our own classroom-friendly versions.
A company the from the university called CEL came in to help us. They ran a workshop in which we had to try and determine who the killer was using all the skills we had learnt in previous sessions. We analysed “urine”, “blood”, “sick” and “bugs”.
Soon we had to start the rehearsal period for our end of project performance. This time was a murder mystery extravaganza, in which the audience got to take part in all of the experiments in the interval. With an amazing script written by one of our drama teachers we set out to perform an amazing new play.
On the night of the performance it all went well and all of our parents did really well at trying to understand the complicated experiments. We had a great time acting out all of the scenes and we found it hilarious no matter how many times we had done the scenes already. All in all a fantastic project :)
By Alanna Duff, Ruby Tebbs and Elsie Powers (again :D)
