Schools Project
AUMS continues to strive for more community involvement. For many years, AUMS has wanted to reach out and give back to the Aberdeen City community, in the same ways in which the University of Aberdeen have given us: education, and a passion for science.
In 2017, to ensure that this year was the year in which AUMS finally achieve our goal, Ella Benninghaus was elected as our 'School Project Leader', a role which involves contacting schools in the Aberdeen City area, and organising for individuals within our society to inspire the next generation about why it is important to care for the environment, particularly the ocean environment! Ella successfully contacted and arranged for project members to go to 3 schools within Aberdeen City, for a number of different workshops, with the aim of teaching children of different ages about the marine environment, and to get them excited about science!
School Project Founder (2017/18):
Ella Benninghaus
CLick HEre
Our workshops comprise of age-appropriate stations, each of which help the children gain an appreciation and understanding of the complexity and fragility, yet beauty of the ocean environment. The idea of making the workshops a circuit-type event, was developed by one of our members at our first ice-breaker event, who has previously helped in school projects at his high school, and has helped develop the workshops since the start.
At each workshop, there will be an age-appropriate circuit, with stations designed to teach and inspire the children about the marine environment and about science. However, before being able go into each school, there has been, and will continue to be, a lot of preparation! In the Autumn/ Winter term there is an ice-breaker event where we gauge interest of possible volunteers, getting to know them and hearing about their experiences and ideas. There will also be public speaking workshops, to help the old and new members of the project to gain confidence in speaking in public. In the Spring/ Summer term of this year, two workshops are run which will help members of the project understand how to appropriately and safely help the children through the workshop stations. Finally, project members will be recruited to set up the workshop stations; all of the themes for the stations were thought up by our amazing project members, and include a range of themes, from photo identification to show how difficult, yet important it is to be able to accurately identify species, to a feeding mechanism station, to show how different animals feed, and how plastic particles can easily find their way into the food chain, creating issues, not only for the animals themselves but for humans also.
This project could not have been completed without all of the members of the 2017/18 committee, and of the society, but we are all extremely grateful that Ella took on the responsibility of leading this project, she was the pioneer behind this whole initiative. Without Ella, this rewarding and important project could not have become a reality. AUMS hope that each year, the project can continue to grow, and help reach out to more and more children throughout Aberdeen.
