RCS Union Launches 2014 Science Challenge Competition and Questions
On Tuesday the RCSU (Royal College of Science Union) celebrated the introduction to the next RCSU Science Challenge Competition with a launch event in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building.
On Tuesday the RCSU (Royal College of Science Union) celebrated the introduction to the next RCSU Science Challenge Competition with a launch event in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building.
As well as prospective entrants from Imperial and several secondary schools the event also played host to an influential panel of judges and speakers, including Professor Fay Dowker, Professor of Theoretical Physics and former student of Stephen Hawking, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller DCB, Chair of Imperial College Council and Former Director General of MI5, and Pallab Ghosh, BBC News Science Correspondent and former Felix Editor.
The winners of the competition will be chosen separately from Imperial students and secondary school students. For the essay questions, the Imperial overall winner receives £1000 and a trip to CERN while each question winner received £400. For school essays, the overall winner wins £500 and a trip to CERN while the winners for each question receive £200. Instead, for the video question, the overall winner wins £1000 while the Imperial and School runner ups each receive £200.
At the launch event the audience were treated to short talks from each of the judges, who discussed the importance of communicating science to a wider audience and imparted several nuggets of wisdom to the captive audience.
The competition will be open to students from February 1 to March 3, 2014 and each entrant will be able to select a single question from the competition.
Questions:
“What does science tell us about the nature of time” — Prof. Fay Dowker (Essay: 800 words max)
“Write a letter to my five year old daughter, Charlotte, about how one or more areas of science, technology, engineering or medicine that fascinate you will have will have developed by the time she is at University and which subject you would encourage her to study and why” – Pallab Ghosh (Essay: 800 words max)
“How should we decide which species to prioritise for conservation?” — John Kudlick, Society of Biology (Essay: 800 words max)
“Explain a scientific concept in a 3-minute video-clip” — Dr. Jad Marrouche, Former RCSU President and current Imperial College research associate at CERN (Video: Answer via a video clip uploaded to YouTube with #RCSsciencechallenge).
