Hilderstone Radio Society Education and Outreach
The Hilderstone Radio Society has had many years of experience of taking Amateur Radio into schools and to the Guiding and Scouting organisations. The club can offer a variety of activities to enhance the science curriculum.
Here are some past examples of outreach:
– Making a radio at Charles Dickens school.
– Making ‘squishy’ circuits at Callis Grange infant school.
– Tracking the FUNcube satellite at Dane Court School.
– Making a transistor tester circuit at Ursuline College for year 5’s.
– Running an Arduino coding club at River Primary school, Dover.
– Running an Amateur Radio and Coding club at St Joseph’s primary school.
- Space club at Wellesley House school.
The club’s collaboration with Wellesley House school culminated in the amateur radio contact with Tim Peake on the International Space Station in April 2016. We helped two pupils to obtain their amateur radio Foundation licence so that they could make the actual contact with the space station. On the day before the contact we organised a ‘buildathon’ with pupils from local secondary pupils building a radio receiver.
We work with Guide groups on their ‘Thinking Day on the Air’ in February enabling the Brownies to obtain their communicators badge. Similarly with the Scouts on their ‘Jamboree on the Air’ in October, we put on some activities and a special radio station for them to send greetings messages. In December we have the call sign GB18YOTA for youngsters on the air, held at Wellesley House school, which is always a great hit with the pupils.
We are the custodians of Pfizer’s Space Lab in a Box which consists of a Software Defined Radio receiver and an antenna. The aim is to download telemetry from the orbiting educational satellite called FUNcube. Pupils learn about the space environment such as weightlessness and understand satellite orbits. It was taken to numerous schools prior to the Tim Peake contact as it showed how little time there was for communicating with Tim!
At the moment the club has started a girls only group called the STEAMettes, mostly from St Joseph’s primary school. They have made electronic projects such as the 555 timer oscillator so that they can practise their Morse code. The girls help the club at the Big Bang Science Festival in March at the Discovery Park. We have been working with an Australian amateur radio school club called SARCNET (http://sarcnet.org/) and with the Mills Spring Academy in Atlanta, Georgia.
Please contact the club if you would like help teaching electromagnetic waves, electricity and magnetism, electronics, coding with the BBC Microbit, Arduino and Raspberry Pi, or satellites. Also we can help with British Science Week in March. Simply send an email to secretary@g0hrs.org.