Not all scientists wear white coats!

Published: 22 March 2019

Researchers from GPPC held a workshop with two classes of P6 students at the Cathedral Primary School in Motherwell as part of the school’s STEM Week activities

Photo of STEM week exhibition 2019P6 students at the Cathedral Primary School in Motherwell got to be social scientists for a day as part of their school’s STEM Week activities.

Susan Browne, Michelle McKelvie and Yvonne Cunningham from GPPC worked with the mini-researchers last week to carry out a survey of their classmates and analyse and present the results.

The children discussed research questions, tallied up results and worked hard to design eye-catching tables and bar charts to display their findings. Teachers and students enjoyed the experience and the GPPC researchers plan to bring this activity to more schools in future.

The school visit is one of the many public engagement activities which were carried out by GPPC researchers in the past six months. Others included:

  • having researchers at The Forge talk to shoppers about the health risks of watching television and not getting enough sleep;
  • engaging with visitors to the Explorathon Extravaganza about take-up of cancer screening;
  • talking to shoppers in IKEA about treatment burden.

The visit to IKEA was part of the MVLS event ‘At Home with Life Sciences’ and this video is now available if you would like to enjoy it all over again. 


First published: 22 March 2019