The NSTC is an online test created by academics in university Chemistry departments at Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Southampton, Oxford, and Warwick. It is designed to encourage school students to try something positive and enjoyable that allows them to demonstrate their scientific thinking skills, which they may not even know they have.

This year, our Year 10 students again took part in this challenge. This is how one of our lovely students described it:

Recently, our class took part in the National Science Thinking Challenge, which proved to be quite an ambitious project for all of us. The quiz had a mix of logical and scientific thinking, with thought-provoking questions linked to the real world and problems we face today. Some examples of this included climate change and plastic pollution in our oceans. Not only did it make us ponder the questions themselves and how to solve them, but it also made us reflect on our world, with the quiz having specific links to topics correlated with those in the questions. Our class came out with great scores, the majority ranging from bronze to gold. Overall, it proved to be a positively challenging quiz, and I’m sure we can also say it was a constructive way to push ourselves and strive to be better.