Switching students on to science is the main aim of Wales Science Year, which is sponsoring a series of events from Cardiff to Colwyn Bay until December.

“There are limitless opportunities in science - not just physics, chemistry and biology but vulcanology - the study of volcanoes - virology and herpatology, the study of reptiles. And you don’t have to do a degree to get involved,” says Dr Sue Cavell, the national co-ordinator.

At Blackwood School near Newport, Gwent, recently, fire fighters, blood-transfusion officers, geneticists and conservationists talked about the science involved in their work. Some pupils met the geneticist Dr Steve Jones at a genetics day hosted by the University of Aberystwyth, Others have enjoyed lectures on code-breaking and the Enigma machine or smashing the land speed record, Wales Science Year is also contributing to the National and Youth Eistedfoddau and the International Science Festival at Wrexham.

Sue Cavell says getting students interested is a long-term process. In a former job, raising the profile of science among Tasmanian pupils, she found it took three years for enrolments for science subjects to increase at the University of Tasmania.

Measuring the success of enrichment projects is hard, says Colin Johnson, a member of the Science Year steering group and director of Techniquest, Wales’s only hands-on-science centre. But the demand for science activities is growing. Since Techniquest moved to a purpose-built centre in 1995, it has had 1.5 million visitors, a third of them from schools. “We provide a different environment from schools, where young people can carry out their own investigations and have time to discuss what they have seen and done - this can be difficult to achieve in classes of 30,” says Mr Johnson.

Techniquest, based in Cardiff, runs workshops which dovetail with the national curriculum and has a range of experts on hand to work with pupils.

Recent successes include “Dinosaur Detectives”, an interactive theatre show for primary children, and the Brain Drain, a presentation which looks at memory, co-ordination and vision.

Techniquest also aims to support teachers. Mr Johnson says that primary teachers go away more confident, with new ideas to use in school; it also runs an MSc in science and communication and popular in-service training courses.

Mr Johnson sees low salaries as a deterrent for would-be scientists, and the main reason why students are more attracted to degrees such as business studies and computer science. But he is encouraged by the rise in the number of undergraduates studying biological sciences, for instance, which has increased by 50 per cent over the past five years.

LOG ON TO SCIENCE

www.walesscienceyear.org.uk and www.techniquest.org l Colin Johnson and Sue Cavell will be speaking at the “Wales Science Year - switched on to science” seminar at 11.45am on Friday, May 24.l The Ceredigion science advisory team will present a workshop, “Having fun with science! Parents and pupils working together”, on Thursday, May 23 and Friday, May 24.