Powering Future Industries
Our Middle School students participated in activities as part of National Science Week where staff incorporated this year's theme, Innovation: Powering Future Industries into investigating the advancement of many technologies and especially the most popular one currently- Artificial Intelligence. Science Week is designed to promote thought, encourage questioning and experimentation and our Science Week quiz and enquiry sessions brought large groups of inquisitive students to our lunchtime experiments in the Labs and gave them the opportunity to hear from our guest speaker about aeronautical engineering.
The hype around Chat GPT over the past year has forced us to take note of Artificial Intelligence and start to think morally and ethically about the ramifications on our future. During Science Week students learnt about the history of AI via our ClickView platform- https://clickv.ie/w/8xNv, discovered it is not so new, having been around since the 1940’s, and learnt more about how Scientists have been using this technology for many years.
Year 7 student Tharun Prathup reflected on the week:
"Science week! What a good week to be at school to experience the world of science! This year’s Science Week was sensational with an abundance of activities to choose from. I really enjoyed the activities with mini experiments ranging from elephant's toothpaste to colour changing water. Some of the benefits of science mean we can learn more about how science influences so many things around us every day, and it opens up your thinking to a whole new world. Without young scientists like us we would be still back in the stone age surviving without the amazing technological advances in machinery and medicines."
Tharun also asked his friend, Jonathan Ng (Year 7) about his favourite activity and he responded with “I really loved the fun Science competition”.
Future generations require scientific thought and the related skills more than ever. In 2020 ‘The Word Economic Forum’ created a report to look at the Top 15 Skills required by employers across the world. This report has tracked the cross-functional skills which are in increasing demand and ones which employers see as rising in prominence by 2025 ... which is not that far away!
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
- Emotional intelligence
- Troubleshooting and user experience
- Service orientation
- Systems analysis and evaluation
- Persuasion and negotiation
With these skills dominating our future, our critical and creative thinkers are encouraged to pursue the Sciences and explore the possibilities within both the traditional and new exciting industries. Science Week 2023 highlighted only a small part of these but importantly, it gave our students the opportunity to have fun with science and learn about pathways for their future.
Megan Ellis
Assistant Dean of Learning - Middle School
Source Future of Jobs Survey 2020, World Economic Forum.
