The Ogden Trust

 
The third annual Senior Physics Challenge, again supported by The Ogden Trust, was held in Cambridge in June. The Ogden Trust was delighted to have one of its own scholars on the course for the second time. Last year Harry Eakins and Chris Jones attended.  Emma Colliver, pictured right receiving her certificate, is a sixth former at St. Paul's Girls' School. We hope Emma is the first of many of our scholars to attend the Senior Physics Challenge and a report of her visit will be available online shortly.
 
 

 

The Senior Physics Challenge is a five-day summer school for students who have just finished their AS year, which aims to make more accessible to a wider range of students, the transition to university physics in the UK.

 

 

 

Teachers are asked to nominate one or two high achieving students for the course who have shown aptitude for physical and mathematical thinking, shown promise at GCSE and during their AS year, and must be taking Physics and Mathematics forward to A2. This year 63 students attended the school, staying in various Cambridge colleges and taking part in a week of intensive tuition. The programme consists of lectures and lab work, culminating in a competition to design and build a water propelled rocket, as well as some guidance on university admissions. The content is at a university undergraduate level, and obviously designed to stretch students. This years topics included Newtonian Mechanics, Orbital Dynamics, Kinetic Theory and Special Relativity.

 

 

 

The programme was established in an attempt stop the loss of talented students to other subjects at university level by exposing students to the style and analytical power of university level physics, absent from the AS course. Feedback from students suggested that they both enjoyed the challenge of attempting such high level work and around two thirds stated that their desire to study physics at university had increased as a direct result of the course.