STEAM Challenge – British Science Week Poster Competition

‘Can we go to the park, it’s a nice afternoon?’ says my child.  

I have already spent 2 hours this morning supervising my kids in the local swimming pool and I have a mountain of chores to do. 

‘Errm, well you have been to the pool already, and I’m not sure I have the time now’. 

‘Aww, so what shall I do?’ says child. 

How much I hate those words. In fairness, my kids are pretty good at amusing themselves, but they always seem to want my attention when I’m short of……..TIME!  Now there’s a thought! 

What to do?

I dig out the list of STEAM challenges that I collect for these very occasions. Some challenges require lots of my time to assist, but others like a good old poster competition are far less intensive.

Do you see the theme that’s emerging? Time. And by happy serendipity, that’s the theme for this year’s British Science Week! 

While still at my desk I locate the British Science Week website and brain dump the theme and guidance to my kid. The website suggests many possible topics on the subject of time: Evolution, seasons and time zones, lifecycles, lifespans, clocks, sundials, engineering, science in the future and lots more. 

After a few minutes of discussion, my kid says, ‘I know, I’m going to do a poster about what my school will look like in the future’. 

‘Good idea, maybe you can show a classroom in the past AND a classroom in the future. Maybe have a blackboard and chalk in the old classroom?’, I suggest.  

‘What’s a blackboard?’ says my child. I am stunned and feel very old. They walk off to get some paper and pens and have a chat with Google. I’m assuming it’s about classrooms of the future. 

I go back to my in-tray and get over an hour of peace and quiet…perfect! 

When my kid comes back, they are carrying a half decent drawing of a past and future classroom complete with flesh and blood teacher in the past and full-on robot educator in the future.  

C’mon I say, let’s go Google for some fun science stuff to write on the drawing.  

Result!

The final result looked like this, and I didn’t think it was half bad considering it was a pretty autonomous activity: 

Thank you, British Science Week! I got some peace and quiet, and my kid now knows what a blackboard is as well as some fun facts about AI, robots, 3D printers and VR headsets. 

As a little extra fun, we asked our AI friend Image Creator to create the same image, and this was the result. We loved it but we thought human generated original was better! What do you think? 

Note that the closing date for entries to the poster competition is 6.00 pm on Thursday 28 March 2024, and there are loads of wonderful resources on the British Science Week website to get you started and to inspire your little ones.