For the fifth year, Kingaroy State High School’s Year 10 advanced science students visited the Centre for Advanced Imaging for 2 ½ days of immersive, hands-on imaging science. For the KSHS rural students, it’s an eye-opener about the possibilities of the world of science, according to Head of Science Steven Langton, who has organised and travelled with the students every year.
“The students gain a huge amount from the excursion, it always blows them away,” says Mr Langton.
“It’s also helped many of our students over the years decide on whether they want to go into senior science. The number of students choosing senior sciences in our school has increased over recent years, whereas other schools are seeing a decrease. There is a real wow factor with this excursion and students often say it’s the best one they have ever done.
“The long-term effect is that the CAI excursion contributes to our prestige as a school, in the sense that our local community really values it. We have had people send students to the school based on the fact that we run this program.”
The visits are coordinated by Dr Craig Bell and staffed by PhD candidates and Post-Doctoral researchers from the Thurecht Research Group. During the visit, the Year 10 students get to analyse materials that they made back in Kingaroy using the high-tech characterisation equipment that is housed within CAI, have a guided tour of the radiochemistry and human scanning instrumentation, and the whole visit is wrapped up with an optical imaging session that showcases the nanomedicine development that the Thurecht group researches. For CAI’s researchers, it’s a chance to better their science communication skills, talking about their work with someone other than their peers.
PhD student Amber Prior commented that she enjoyed the challenge of having to explain her research to a younger audience not familiar with her field. “It was very fulfilling to see them engaged and interested with the complex imaging techniques that I did not learn until Uni!”.
PhD student Tom Jarrett loved seeing how all the students uniquely engaged with the activities. “It’s so great to see how smart, funny, and passionate they all are. It’s easy to forget how much of a unique opportunity research is, and how cool that is. The purposes, results, and application of our work is often quite abstract. It’s quite rewarding to see a positive impact getting made in a tangible way.”
Mr Langton believes that the engagement with CAI staff is great and the students feel really privileged to have so many researchers helping them. He said his students do have their favourites, often the younger researchers, but some said they like the diversity of researchers because it makes them see that science is for everyone.
CAI deputy director Prof. Kris Thurecht can attest to the long-term benefit of being inspired by science when you’re at school. Kris attended Kingaroy State High School himself, being taught by Mr Langton, before an academic career at UQ, overseas, and now back as Principal Research Fellow at the Centre.
PhD student Mengdie Li noted the significance of this succession: Kris’s high school was Kingaroy and he used to be Steve’s student. We are Kris’s students. So it’s Steve’s student’s students teaching Steve’s students.
Dr Craig Bell thinks it’s great that the program he’s been running since 2017 has delivered an increase of students into senior-level science, with students going on to tertiary education. “For me, the highlight of the visit is the quiz at the end. The concepts that we are trying to get across to the students over the course of 2 ½ days are quite hard, and it’s gratifying to see that they get most, if not all, of what we are teaching them!”.
KSHS teacher Steven Langton agrees. “The challenging concepts that the students are exposed to better prepares them for senior science. We believe the visits also encourage more students to do STEM courses at university. Last year six former Kingaroy students came to visit us while we were doing the CAI excursion. They were all in their first year at UQ doing STEM-related courses and they all had fond memories of their CAI visit.”
CAI hopes that, like Kris Thurecht, they continue through to research advanced imaging here. In the meantime, the Centre looks forward to hosting another Year 10 excursion in 2023.
