Middle school students, Flora, Luke, Sophie and Joe won the Central Yorkshire heat of the Royal Society of Chemistry Top of the Bench competition last Wednesday 25th January at the University of York, Chemistry department. This is a national competition involving hundreds of students and gives them the opportunity to put their practical and teamwork skills into action. Below is an account of the activities involved. 

After a quick introduction, the competing schools were split into two groups, where participants were either taken to the teaching laboratory or to a classroom. Pocklington’s group had five tasks requiring different skills, which varied from skim reading in a comprehension task, teamwork and memory in a molecule-building task, to general chemical knowledge in a timed set of questions. 

The team moved on to laboratory work and after a brief introduction to the university laboratory, they were presented with their first task which was to finely time a small explosion. The pupils were marked on tidiness and teamwork, which called for a level-headed attitude and good decision-making. The second laboratory task had two requirements. The Pocklington team needed to sort unlabelled brine solutions in order of density in the simplest way possible without the use of balances. Secondly, they had to determine the identity of the person who removed the labels from the bottles by passing the ink from the marker pens through a process of chromatography. 

Jenny McDowell, Head of Chemistry at Pocklington School commented: “The success of the team is an excellent achievement, and I am thrilled the pupils have been invited to represent Central Yorkshire at the final in London later this year. It was a privilege to take the team of pupils and witness their teamwork and perseverance with problem-solving"