Wycombe Abbey International School Changzhou: Update from Dr Dawber, wednesday 29/06/16

My last day in Changzhou! Am really looking forward to getting home but I shall miss this place so much, especially the people - staff and students have been wonderful and I have had an amazing time and learned so much.

Monday was incredibly wet, but despite the torrential downpour, everybody was outside in the morning for Sports Day. All the usual track and field events, plus some great fitness-based interhouse games, finishing off with the interhouse relay and tug of war. Everyone was completely drenched and covered in mud from head to foot by the end but entered into it in great spirit and much fun was had by all.

In the afternoon, I worked on my final two big experiment mornings and then was asked to do an extra session with the yr13s, ahead of their final Physics exam the following afternoon. We went over mass defect and nuclear binding energy, and then discussed good exam technique. I hope it helped. Once again they seemed very grateful and appreciative, which makes it such a pleasure to teach them.

Tuesday was a day with a few more frustrations. First of all, the language barrier meant that the technician hadn't completely understood some of the things that I had asked for, so some equipment wasn't read for the experiments lesson with year 8, and we had a bit of a scramble getting it sorted. That meant that some of things we had weren't ideal. Also, one of the classes had not been given the message by their teachers that they were supposed to be there, thus somebody had to go and fetch them, so we started late. That aside, all went well. Each group had three tasks to complete. The first was to build the tallest possible tower that would support a cream egg, using just 8 sheets of A4 paper. They came up with some ingenious designs, and the tallest was just over 70cm high. The prizes were the cream eggs, of course! The second task was to hang weights off a spring and use the results to plot a mass-extension graph. They then had to hang an 'alien' (an unknown wrapped mass with a picture of an alien on the front!) from their spring, record the extension and use the graph to calculate the mass of the alien. The best students were within 10g of the real mass. The final challenge was to cook an egg using a beaker, a tripod, a piece of foil 25cm square and a tealight! The idea was to cook the egg (to the judges' satisfaction) using the least mass of wax, so the team whose tealight lost least mass were the winners. There were some slight frustrations here as the tealights were smaller than those we use in the UK and some of them ran out of wick before the egg was completely cooked, but most successfully cooked (and ate - yuck!) their egg, the best team using only just over half a gram of wax.

Tuesday afternoon saw the indoor rowing ergo competition between houses. The in the evening I went into town with the Head, the two deputy heads and the two gap year students who have been working here and who are now returning home, ready to start university next year. A tasty dinner at Monkey King had been arranged to say thank you and good luck to them, and goodbye to me.

This morning (my last day!) the rain finally started to ease a little. My final lesson was with the year 9s on rockets and flight - or on Bernoulli's principle and Newton's third law, if you prefer. We started by thinking about famous men and women (including David Beckham, Lewis Hamilton, Andy Murray and Helen Sharman) whose skills make use of these principles. We discussed all the forces that act on an aeroplane, then we carried out some simple experiments with paper to show that the faster the airflow, the lower the pressure - Bernoulli's principle - and looked at how this idea can be used to explain how lift is produced and how aeroplanes fly. We then did a raft of experiments and demos to show this effect, with airblowers, straws, pingpong balls and maltesers, and looked at how these ideas can be applied to birds, sailing boats, sharks, submarines, formula one cars and in the use of spin on tennis and footballs. Then we went on to look at the idea of action and reaction (Newton's 3rd), and how this can be observed when you release a balloon, fire a gun, go swimming or step out of a boat. We watched brief video clips of canons being fired and Apollo 15 being launched, to see how these idea are applied to launching rockets. Finally, for the finale, we went outside and launched our own rockets - little ones made from film canisters, alkaselzter and water, and larger ones with drinks bottle, water and pump. This of course involves a lot of water spraying everyone and everyone getting very wet and having a lot of fun! The students left a little damp but in high spirits, so it was definitely a success, and hopefully something they will remember. I certainly thoroughly enjoyed it.

Now for a final meeting and debrief with the head, then a taxi to Shanghai to a hotel near the airport for tonight.