APC at School - November 2010
Each year, scientists from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC), and even some of the clinicians, can be found back in primary schools around Cork city and county talking to young students about some aspect of biology, such as the “The Guts of Digestion”, “Our 5 Senses” and “Microbes – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. APC researchers have given these interactive talks, along with experiments suitable for the classroom, for the last 6 years, involving almost 30,000 pupils.
This year, for Science week in November, we broached the topic of the “Circulatory System” in a slightly different fashion, in an effort to introduce Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE) into the classroom. This new approach has stemmed from APC’s involvement in an EU FP7 proposal to introduce teachers in European schools to IBSE. In other words, we encourage the pupils and teachers to approach a topic or question like a scientist would, by coming up with a hypothesis and designing experiments to test their hypothesis. So the pupils, along with the APC researcher, come up with a Big Question relating to the circulatory system, that they need to work out how to answer (e.g. what happens to my heart during exercise?). Then the students hypothesis about what might happen, and then design an experiment to help answer their Big Question over the course of the next hour during which the APC scientist presents information about the heart. This approach has proven a huge success, with the pupils genuinely enjoying the opportunity to be “real scientists” for a while and working out how to design a hypothesis-driven experiment from scratch. In the example above – what happens to my heart during exercise? – the students decided that their heart rate would probably increase and to prove this hypothesis, they worked out that they would need to measure resting heart rate. This could be done by measuring their pulse, which they would do for 30 seconds (using a timer) and multiply by 2, and combine their own rate with two classmates in order to do the experiment in triplicate. Then they agreed to do star jumps for 1.5 minutes, which they felt was long enough to get a change in heart rate but not so long as to exhaust them or drive the students in the classroom below mad, and measure their hear rate again in triplicate. They then compared their resting heart rate per minute with their heart rate per minute after exercise, and proved their hypothesis was correct. At the end of the experiment they concluded that the increased heart rate ensured an increased level of circulation, which meant more oxygen and energy for their muscles! They also noticed other facts, like their breathing rate increased too.
