Success at the Cambridge University Chemistry Challenge

Cambridge University presented seven S6 students with Silver and Copper Awards for the 2019 Chemistry Challenge.

The pupils entered the competition in June and the University awarded certificates to our pupils after the summer break.

The Silver Award places Shreyas, Huzefah and Faraz in the top 19% of the 9,010 students who entered the competition from across the UK and some international centres in China, Thailand and Singapore.

Copper Awards were presented Saketh, Mus’ab, Varun and Leonid who came in the top 34.2%.

The competition takes the form of a 90-minute written paper set by an experienced team of teachers and university chemists. It is designed to be accessible to S6 students but takes them significantly beyond the syllabus and encourages them to think about science in the way they would at university.

On this achievement, their teacher Dr Smith said: “This was a really excellent paper and an extremely interesting and challenging exercise for our top students.

“2019 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s first periodic table. His table is impressive, but there are a number of errors.

“Students were provided with information and leading questions to reveal some of these anomalies. Mendeleev did update his periodic table in 1871 after solving these anomalies himself.”