STEMFest 2024: Darwin’s Voyage

Join us this October for our annual STEMFest event, from 7th to the 18th of October 2024!

After the success of last year’s STEMFest, we are excited to announce that we will once again be exploring evolution through the work of the Darwin200 expedition. Students will be invited to travel back in time to follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin as he navigated the globe after setting sail from Plymouth, Britain’s Ocean City.

STEMFest will take place at the National Marine Aquarium and will provide a variety of activities to inspire and engage. Exploring real-world conservation techniques, students can expect ecological surveys, scientific drawing and virtual reality. Students will take a deep dive into the Theory of Evolution, learning things that Darwin himself didn’t know! Classes will finish their day with an interactive show, which will leave everyone excited to explore local habitats and take action to protect them.

STEMFest has been designed for students in Key Stage 2 & 3, with a day dedicated to Home-Educated learners of this age on October 8^th/10^th.  Each day will run from 10am – 2pm, and includes an introduction, tour, workshop and show. It costs £8 per student (incl. VAT) with free spaces available for supervising teachers (ratios dependant on age of learners).

What will my day look like?

Introduction: All groups will meet in the morning to be introduced to the team and get excited for the day ahead!

Tour: Our tour will focus on three key exhibit spaces at the NMA and will allow students to get hands on with some real-life conservation techniques. This tour will use virtual reality, quadrats and discussions to encourage exploration and discovery. Ever wondered how many different species are in our Great Barrier Reef exhibit? Why sharks have different shaped teeth? Or what it feels like to live in a rockpool? All these questions and more will be answered during your tour!

Workshop: This interactive workshop will travel back in time, to the beginning of life on our planet. Students will use a dice-based game to draw the evolutionary progression of their very own animals to better understand Darwin’s finch theory. Concepts such as speciation, adaptation and natural selection will all be covered, before we see whose animals can survive extinction events and make it to the modern day!

Show: The day will culminate with an interactive show, delivered in front of our huge Eddystone tank! The show will fill the gap between Darwin’s theory, and the most up to date thinking on DNA, – 165 years of learning in 20 minutes!

Please see below an example of your day, the order/timings of your activities may vary.

We will also be providing a host of free post-visit activities, all designed to support the learning of STEMFest when back in your classrooms. These can be downloaded here:

To book your class on to STEMFest 2024 – click here:

To book your child onto Home Educator STEMFest 2024 – click here:

If this all sounds incredibly exciting but you don’t live locally – don’t worry! We are also hosting a virtual STEMFest! To find out more, click here:

If you have any further questions, or wish to discuss any aspects of the event in more detail, please contact learning@oceanconservationtrust.org or call us on 01752 275233.

Testimonials

“STEM Fest was a fantastic opportunity for our children it gave them a lot to think about. It linked really well with our next Science unit and with an English unit we will be undertaking in January.”

“As teachers the whole of the accompanying staff really enjoyed the day. They had mentioned how they learnt something themselves which they did not know and wanted others to know it as well. The children were recalling facts the following day and using some of the knowledge applying it to their English learning.”

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