Day 4 Thursday 27 October 2011

Today we were at Wick High School, where we delivered a repeat of yesterday’s workshops. We did “Chemistry on Cue” (the clock reaction challenge) twice in the morning with S4 students and “Just a Minute” (film canister popping excitement) three times in the afternoon with S1 pupils. The winning team in one of the competitions managed to get their canister to pop after an impressive 1 minute 2 seconds – that will be a hard time to beat.

Once we had packed up and said our farewells, we raced back to Thurso to spend some time at Caithness Horizons before it closed for the day at 6pm. This is a fascinating museum, which, as it says in its publicity leaflet, “tells the story of mankind’s past and present interaction with the environment of north Scotland.” We spent most of our time studying the gallery dedicated to the history and science of the work at Dounreay nuclear power station, with its experimental fast breeder reactors. The site is now undergoing decommissioning, which is expected to take at least 25 years. There is the opportunity to try using a mechanical arm to pick up “fuel rods” and manoeuvre them into holes of various sizes. This equipment is surprisingly easy to use and you very quickly get the feel for manipulating objects remotely. Not that I was allowed a very long turn, as Ben hogged it most of the time. I wish that I had seen this exhibition before I visited the Dounreay site on my previous trip to Caithness (in 2008), as I would have been able to make more sense of what I’d seen. Another highlight of our visit to Caithness Horizons was the excellent tea and cake in the café.

We spent part of the remainder of the evening playing a game that Philip Page (a Chemist and STEM Ambassador from Dounreay) had lent us. It was a game developed in the 1970s called “Black Box”, based on the idea of working out the positions of atoms in a molecule. We quickly got the hang of it and ended up playing until rather later than we had intended – so much for the early night!