{"id":5787,"date":"2022-06-23T19:53:29","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T18:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/?p=5787"},"modified":"2022-06-24T09:42:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T08:42:23","slug":"fife-stem-connect-ability-festival-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/fife-stem-connect-ability-festival-workshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Fife STEM Connect-ability Festival workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public Engagement – Henry Rae holds Fife STEM Connect-ability Festival workshop at Castlehill Primary School<\/strong><\/p>\n

An interactive, in-person medical sciences workshop was held at Castlehill Primary School on Monday, June 13.\u00a0 The session, entitled \u201cMessing with your Senses\u201d, was facilitated by the School of Medicine\u2019s teaching lab technician, Henry Rae, and assisted by Senior Lecturer, Dr John Winpenny, and was a part of the Fife STEM Connect-ability Festival<\/a>.\u00a0 68 pupils and their teachers from primary six participated.<\/p>\n

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Dr John Winpenny operates the \u201cSwing Box\u201d for students to experience how external stimuli can affect balance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Experiments and demonstrations during the session were modelled around actual practicals from the University\u2019s undergraduate syllabus, with technical aspects simplified.\u00a0 Henry expressed his delight at seeing the pupils learn quickly and show a great level of interest in the medical sciences: \u201cI was amazed by how much knowledge they had already.\u00a0 They were also very inquisitive and did a lot of deductive reasoning\u201d, he said. \u201cAt the end of the day, even if the pupils forget every little detail which we told them but remember that science is good fun and medicine is interesting, that will be a win. Every time they see something medical or science-related, they are not going to switch-off thinking \u2018that’s too difficult\u201d.<\/p>\n

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A pupil wears modified ear defenders as part of a demonstration of how hearing works<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The pupils each got a chance at various experiments including demonstrations on focus and balance using the Wobble\/ Swing Box, the Barany Chair and posture experiments, lessons on how the ears and eyes work using modified ear defenders, depth perception experiments, experiments on the interaction of our senses using the McGurk Effect<\/a> and blind-spot experiments, and many more.\u00a0 Teachers were not left out and got a chance at each of the experiments.\u00a0 Henry hopes that by getting the teachers involved, the experiments will carry on not just in these three classrooms but extend to other classes.<\/p>\n

Henry highlighted the continued support from the University and School leadership for Public Engagement and thanked Dr John Winpenny who volunteered to help with the workshop.\u00a0 He will be continuing his public engagement sessions at Newport Primary School on the 24th<\/sup> of June, where the pupils will no doubt be excited to participate in these fun but educational experiments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Public Engagement – Henry Rae holds Fife STEM Connect-ability Festival workshop at Castlehill Primary School An interactive, in-person medical sciences workshop was held at Castlehill Primary School on Monday, June 13.\u00a0 The session, entitled \u201cMessing with your Senses\u201d, was facilitated by the School of Medicine\u2019s teaching lab technician, Henry Rae, and assisted by Senior Lecturer,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[1240,339,568],"class_list":["post-5787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-outreach-public-engagement","tag-castlehill-primary-school","tag-dr-john-winpenny","tag-henry-rae"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-16 18:10:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicine.st-andrews.ac.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}