The Future Project – Leading Science Education

ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

The Future Project (TFP) at The King’s School is a leader in science education. The Project advances much needed development of science and research in our nation and is the first of its kind in Australian schools. It is a cutting-edge example of the transformational power of industry-school partnerships.

The Project’s mission is to motivate and engage the next generation of scientists and engineers. Applications are invited annually from senior students across the Sydney metropolitan region to participate in the Project.

These young science interns then work on authentic research projects in industry level laboratories, with research companies that are partners of TFP. These companies are based at the Project’s location - the state-ofthe-art Science Centre at The King’s School. University partnerships are also fostered by the Project. This adds further value to the exceptional experiences provided to the secondary students and skills that they develop through the program.

The research work of the student interns culminates with their work being published in TFP’s own journal – The Journal of The Future Project - before they have even completed their secondary education! Students also have the opportunity to have their work published in external peer-reviewed journals.

Senior Interns (Year 11)

The Future Project has continued to gain significant interest, from students, parents and the greater community. In this time, we have seen applications for Senior Internships from schools in the greater Sydney region grow to over 200 (after each collaborating school undertakes its own selection process). With this increase in demand for opportunities, TFP has worked closely with its collaborating researchers to develop new programs and has now successfully increased to its largest intake - 45 of the Senior Intern students this year.

We were very excited at the start of 2020 as we created a new program called Mission to Mars, where students were to investigate the presence of extremophiles (organisms that grow in environments that are considered harsh for sustaining life) at Lake Urana - a salt lake in far southwest NSW. We were planning a field trip with the students to enable them to study this harsh environment using a variety of different skills and technologies (eg building and programming of robots to collect samples in the field, mapping, drones). The local community of Lake Urana were banding together to welcome our group of some 60+ students, teaching staff and researchers; and then COVID hit!

We could have pulled the pin on the Project there for the year. How the events of 2020 were going to unfold was unknown. But despite this, we decided that we were going to come together and overcome the challenges – so we went to a remote learning program in the form of a competition called ISOHACK 2020. Senior students competed in isolation and by using bioinformatics, they aligned and analysed annotated genomes to gain brand new research insights into horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) genes from horse hindgut.

The students ran with the challenge which involved university level theory and gene sequencing technology, well beyond their years. It was challenging doing this remotely, on top of everything else that we were faced with this year, yet we were determined to succeed and to build resilience. So much credit goes to the students and researchers who ran the remote program, Quantal Bioscience scientists – Dr Belinda Chapman, Dr Michelle Bull and Scott Mitchell. The students did very well. Some of the gene sequencing was particularly outstanding and it may be possible for the students to produce a journal article in an independent peer reviewed journal!

Juniors (Year 10)

This also meant that we had to design projects for the Juniors (Year 10) that, if need be, could be done remotely. Students apply to be part of one of two Year 10 classes – either the Junior Interns or the Junior Science Communicators. They work on their TFP projects during their normal

ALGATEX

science class rotations but extend themselves beyond the Science curriculum.

Junior Interns

This year the Junior Interns built their own bioelectrical battery cells and then, utilising the latest in nanopore DNA sequencing technology – a device called MinION – the students identified the microbes present. As far as is known, we are the only school in Australia (perhaps the world) to have access to this technology. This work is so novel, that a group of the Junior Interns is writing journal articles which they will submit to external peer-reviewed journals. We keenly await to see these published.

Junior Science Communicators

The Junior Science Communicators were not able to host visiting primary school students this year. So instead, they produced science demonstration videos as a resource for primary school teachers. The Science Communicators also made and displayed posters in the Science Centre for this year’s Science Week, on the theme: Deep Blue: Innovation for the future of our oceans. Their third task was to make a scientific model and present this to an audience of scientists. The boys did remarkably well and impressed all of those present.

Dr Vera Munro-Smith Director of The Future Project