I’m very pleased to share with you that FHS won the St Helen’s Physics Tournament for the second consecutive year after their victory in 2022!

Our Year 10 team were:

Isabelle Brown
Catherine Garood
Cordelia Jones
Tarini Malhotra
The girls competed in a Physics ‘triathlon’ against 12 other schools  to complete an experiment challenge, escape room and calculations race.

Teams were each given a tray of equipment which included a timer, ruler, protractor, clamp stand, plasticine, string and pendulum bob. Armed with these items and an equation they were tasked with finding the gravitational field strength of our planet! No formal method was supplied, so the girls needed to devise their own experiment to achieve this aim. The girls, wrote a clear method, collected accurate results and  produced a beautiful graph to achieve an experimental result within 2% of the accepted value. An impressive start leading to a win in this first challenge.
Secondly the girls took part in a Physics based escape room which took place behind closed doors, so I can’t divulge much here! The FHS team managed the second fastest escape time… just in time for lunch!
Finally teams competed in a calculations relay race against the clock and each other. Students needed to solve 10 mathematical physics problems as quickly as possible and have each of them checked off by a teacher from another school. There was a stampede of students running back and forth to collect and deliver new problems to solve. The FHS team were just marginally beaten into second place in this challenge by literally seconds.
The tournament was decided by an algorithm (!), which took account of a team’s overall performance and it was very close… but at the end of the day FHS were the victors.

During the day, participants were also treated to a fascinating talk on aeroponics by a former St Helen’s Student Temi Odanye, Product Development Lead for ‘Lett Us Grow’. Temi is an engineering graduate and worked on this entrepreneurial indoor vertical farming business which has literally grown exponentially: https://www.lettusgrow.com

As you know FHS is no stranger to this technology, as we already have our very own aeroponics tower; so this was very exciting indeed! Temi will be keeping in touch and hopefully available to visit FHS to deliver her talk and further inspire our urban farmers.

Congratulations again to the team for such a phenomenal win!

Dr Price, Teacher of Physics