• The Healthy Heart Programme (0ct 31 to Nov 21 2009)
Working with the British Heart Foundation and the Royal Veterinary College.
This is a four week Saturday school: The key objective is to produce a web page for the yheart section of the British Heart Foundation website. They had to look at how the heart works and convince their peers that it is good to keep it working through a healthy lifestyle.
16 students aged 14 from across London worked on this fascinating project.
The programme:
We shall be looking at aspects of the heart around obesity, blood pressure, respiratory function and blood cells. Most of the time the young people will be doing some form of practical work though there will be short teaching introductions etc. Usually they will be in a lab or dissection room. It goes as follows:
31st October: Introduction by BHF. Dissection.
NB this will be really “hands on” demo of heart with different species/ foetal circulation using specimen so they can see the heart working. Run by Andrew Crook (Chief Technician in Anatomy and his team)
7th November: Blood Pressure and Exercise.
Again mainly practical. Run by David Kilroy (Senior Lecturer in Anatomy) and Professor Caroline Wheeler Jones (Cardiac Research Group)
14th November: Obesity and the Heart.
As above. Run by Dr Stephanie Baylou and Professor Neil Stickland (Department of Veterinary Basic Science)
21st November: Blood cells and the Heart.
As above. Run by Professor Caroline Wheeler Jones and Post doctoral students from the Cardiac Research Group.
• RAF Cranwell ‘Generating Genius’ Summer Camp 12-16 July 09
On the up: Jamal Miller tries his hand at being a pilot
Generating Genius not only works through Universities, its most recent venture has been to take the graduating batch of 16 – year-olds to RAF Cranwell, the officer training airbase and centre for aircraft engineering.
Ambitious: Marcus Nelson in the cockpit of an RAF fighter
The students had to undertake some of the modules that real trainee officers would have to study. One of the favourites was the flight simulator training, where our students learned how to land a million –pound jet fighter.
