Outreach and Schools

Activities for Schools

Chemistry at Heriot-Watt University (Chemistry@HWU) has over 30 years of history of engaging with schools in Scotland, across the Border Counties of England and more widely with the rest of the UK through a range of internally and externally motivated activities. We feel that interaction with school pupils and teachers is important and provide a number of mechanisms to deliver on this agenda and in support of chemistry in schools.

Any queries? Please email Chemistry-Outreach@hw.ac.uk

Internal Activities

Chemistry Schools’ Lecture Series

Our longest standing and highest profile activity is our schools’ lecture series in which we visit your class to talk about various topics in chemistry; some are of a tutorial nature while others illustrate the frontiers of chemical knowledge. These can be provided locally in your school or delivered online as a webinar.

Meet the Scientist

Would you like your students to meet a scientist? Would you like them to find out what makes a scientist tick and how the scientist got to where they are today? We’re offering you the opportunity to invite a working scientist to engage directly with the pupils in answering these and many other questions that they might have about science as a career. We offer this in either an online, webinar format or in your school.

Departmental Visits

We invite you and your students to visit Chemistry@HWU to find out about our facilities, our teaching, and to meet our students and staff. You can even arrange for your students to get some practical experience in our laboratories with some simple scientific activities and or listen to one of our lectures in a university lecture space.

Some of the practical activities that are available during Departmental Visit may also be undertake in your school. We are happy to discuss this with you.

Supporting Advanced Higher Chemistry

We are happy to discuss with chemistry teachers supporting Advanced Higher Chemistry student projects their needs for analytical support. 

External Activities

Royal Society of Chemistry Activities

We support the outreach activities of our professional body, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) which operates events at local section (Edinburgh and South East Scotland) and regional (Scotland) level.

Other Outreach Activities

As part of the Scottish contribution to International Year of Light in 2015, Chemistry@HWU coordinated the “Bright Light, Big Experiments!” project with local secondary school and with the financial support of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 

Chemistry@HWU is a long-standing partner in the Stars ‘r’ Us! Public Engagement Consortium. This consortium, originally established for the Royal Society Summer Exhibition in 2004, seeks to develop public understanding of the links between astronomy, physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser extent, biology. It focuses on the role of chemistry in the evolution of the modern Universe and its links to the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe. If you’d like to learn more about this and interact directly with the Stars ‘r’ Us! Team then contact the Stars ‘r’ Us! team via their website. 

Other enquiries

If you have any queries about Chemistry Outreach activities at Heriot-Watt, please email Chemistry-Outreach@hw.ac.uk.