Running Wild: How a social enterprise's chemistry project wows Welsh schoolchildren

By Neil Cowley, of Wild Elements

The Wild Elements team received support from the Outreach Fund to design, develop and deliver a chemistry project to nine schools throughout North West Wales.

We visited each school on three occasions, working with the same class to explore different themes looking at how chemistry affects our natural world.

The three days were titled ‘Elements All Around Us’, ‘Chemistry Colours Our World’ and ‘Burn, Burn, Burn’. Aspects of this project had been created and delivered as previous programmes, but these were either after-school sessions or half-day sessions. The funding gave us the opportunity to develop these programmes and bring them together in a more cohesive way and gave us more time to explore the topics with the children involved.

We wanted to give the pupils an opportunity to really engage with the world of chemistry and science, delving quite deeply into some of the topics, and empowering them with their new understanding.

The fund helped by providing the time required to plan and create this programme, and acquire a number of resources we wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise. It also enabled us to visit each school three times, giving the pupils a fantastic opportunity and us the ability to build relations with the staff and pupils. Typically, we only have the opportunity to deliver single stand-alone sessions to the schools we visit. We have no idea of any long-term impact we may have. This project gave us the opportunity to witness their development and understanding.

As adults, we sometimes take quite big concepts for granted. However, it’s refreshing to witness the wonder and amazement that children demonstrate when exposed to some of these ideas. For example, it was great to see the reaction of lots of the pupils when we described the size of an atom and explained that everything that exists was made from them. We had lots of children determined to find something that wasn’t made out of atoms (their hair, a book, the air, etc.) until the realisation finally, and nearly audibly, sank in!

We need to thank the staff and pupils of the nine schools we worked with. Their enthusiasm and feedback were invaluable in developing the effectiveness of the programme. We also need to thank the colleagues who were busy behind the scenes ordering resources, and keeping us in check. And of course, a big thank you to the Outreach Team at the RSC for their encouragement and financial support.

This project has been well received by the staff and pupils of the schools who took part. A number of teachers said that they feel more confident to tackle science as a subject with their pupils and to incorporate more experiments into their teaching.

After the three-week programme, 93% of the children stated that they were more interested in chemistry and 64% said that they would consider a career in chemistry.

We now also have a programme and resources that we can use again in the future. We hope to have the opportunity to develop and improve this programme based on the feedback we received and our experiences delivering it.