SAKURA SCIENCE High School Program Group 2
Trying Out Mirror-Making at Saitama Municipal Omiya Kita High School!
On June 17 (Tuesday), 114 total participants, including 102 students from India, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Ukraine, along with 12 supervisors, visited the Saitama Municipal Omiya Kita High School campus.
Following a welcoming address by Principal SEKITA Akira, the four programs for the day were introduced. “The theme is, ‘We Are One.' Let's all come together through our activities today.” In response, all the participants said, “Okay!”
The first program was a workshop to think about schools of the future. 1st-year students at Omiya Kita High School also participated, and the shared theme was “Let's Design a School for the Future.” This was further subdivided into about 10 sub-themes such as “What about libraries?”, “What about cars?”, and “How about the cafeteria?”, and the participants formed teams and shared their ideas. The final presentations featured unique ideas such as “if there were a flying car students could use to avoid getting wet on rainy days, their ability to concentrate and study would improve” and “it would be good if there was a system in place for donating the cafeteria's leftover food” which drew applause from the other participants.
For the second program, participants worked with Omiya Kita High School 3rd -year students and used a chemical reaction called the silver mirror reaction to make mirrors. They did this by applying silver to the surface of a glass plate in the form of silver nitrate aqueous solution. It was difficult to avoid spilling the liquid as they shook the plates left and right to get even coverage, and the Omiya Kita High School students helped out with the work.
The third program was a poster-making session for the 3rd-year students' research results. The participants chose the posters that interested them from a diverse range of themes such as Japanese, biology, chemistry, and art, and exchanged opinions with the Omiya Kita High School students. In front of a poster on the theme of earthquakes, one participant asked, “Does the ground shake vertically or horizontally?” It seemed that the students from countries where there are no earthquakes found the notion of the ground shaking unusual.
The fourth program was “Let's make cherry blossoms bloom with pink labels!” The participants applied pink labels with messages written on them to the area around a tree trunk with “We are One” written on it posted on the gymnasium wall. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom with messages such as “it was really fun,” “thank you for today,” and “let's meet again.”
Although the visit was uncharacteristically hot for the rainy season, it was a day when the participants were able to join together as they and the Omiya Kita High School students got to know each other.
