Last week, we celebrated Space Week in school. Pupils had the opportunity to take part in the Space Week Challenge and the Science Department organised specialist speakers to come into school.

We were delighted to welcome Debbie Soames, a STEM ambassador and retired senior systems engineer, into school to talk to our year 11 pupils about acoustics in a presentation entitled Sound, Sea and Me.

Debbie began by outlining the subjects she studied at college and university which enabled her to follow the path to becoming an engineer working for BAE Systems. In 1983, Debbie won the Queens Award to Industry for working on Nimrod, a retired maritime patrol aircraft, flown by the RAF.

Debbie began by talking about sound and how frequency and loudness is measured. Debbie went on to talk about sounds on land and underwater. The presentation was interactive, beginning with a challenge to find out how high a frequency pupils and staff could hear.

The talk covered how sound is used from warnings at Windscale through to imaging or ultrasound used in sonograms and echocardiograms and as a way of detecting and identifying, for example working how far away a thunderstorm is or the location of a submarine.

Debbie’s fascinating presentation talked about the speed of sound and light and pupils found out which goes faster, sound in air or water before talking about physics theories such as Fourier’s Law, Nyquist Theorem and the Doppler Effect.

Debbie brought a sonobuoy in to show pupils. Pupils watched a video on how the sonobuoy is ejected from aircraft or ships to locate submarines or underwater acoustic research. Pupils learned how all submarines have different noises and different frequencies and operators are trained to recognise the sounds and how the acoustic processing works.

Finally, the presentation concluded with a fun sound quiz and Debbie outlined the variety of jobs and opportunities open to pupils if they study physics at A level, before time for questions.

Thank you to Debbie for coming into school to deliver such an inspiring and informative talk to our year 11 pupils and thanks to Mrs Costigan, Teacher of Science, for organising the talk. 

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