Congratulations to Sophie D’Arcy who recently attended SciFest 2018 with her teacher Ms Waters and received the award for Best Communicator – a fantastic achievement! The title of Sophie’s project was “An investigation on whether movement breaks during Secondary School class aids a student’s ability to focus and learn”. Below is a report by Sophie about her experiences.
Why I chose to enter Sci Fest
I asked a question and after spending some amount of time pondering about what the answer might be, I set about finding out for sure. Entering Sci Fest meant I had a goal. There was a structure to follow and I had a deadline. While I knew this would be a lot of work (I didn’t realise just how much! -thank you Ms Waters) it also gave me a new challenge.
While I started out eager to prove my Hypothesis by the time I had reached the deadline I was happy just to have the end of my project in sight! However, it was worth the effort as the day itself was brilliant. Sci Fest gave me an opportunity to publicly display my word and present to judges. Oh, and I won an award for best communicator which was a massive surprise.
It was only after Sci Fest was over that I realised how much I had actually learnt while working on my project. It was the first time I had attempted something like this, so getting my head around the scale of what I had taken on was difficult. At times I wanted to give up when things didn’t run a smoothly as I had hoped, when I fell behind schedule and when my brain was too tired to think. However, now that it’s over I can honestly say that I am glad I entered Sci Fest.
By Sophie D’Arcy
