SCIENCE (Warsaw)
Capital of Poland, Warsaw was the birthplace of physicist and chemist Marie Sklodowska-Curie, one of the most famous female scientists and a pioneer in the field of radioactivity.
In July 1898, Marie and her husband, Pierre, announced the existence of a new element, Polonium, in which they named in honour of her native Poland. In December of the same year, the couple announced the discovery of a second element, Radium, named for its intense radioactivity. For her efforts, Marie Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and, in 1911, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Not only was Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but the first twice-honoured Nobel laureate and still the only winner awarded in two different sciences.
At Henry Beaufort School, Warsaw is centre for Science and contains eight classroom laboratories, equipped for practical and demonstrative purposes, with a vast selection of apparatus, materials and chemicals suited to the wide range of topics and activities covered in class.
Science
By developing questioning, analytical and evaluative approaches to scientific principles, Science at Henry Beaufort School encourages students to appreciate scientific discovery, understand the moral, social and economic factors of its impact and gain practical skills through the process of investigation and exploration.
In Years 7 and 8, a series of modules examine different aspects of Science and students focus on topics covering aspects of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Throughout this time, students study the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution and distribution of living things and how they interact with each other and with the natural environment; the composition, structure and properties of matter, as well as the changes it undergoes during chemical reactions, and the concept of matter and its motion, dealing with concepts such as force, energy, mass and charge.
Science is a core subject at GCSE and all students gain two qualifications by the end of Year 11: GCSE Science and GCSE Additional Science. Each qualification is divided into units of study that cover Biology, Chemistry and Physics equally.
Throughout these two years, students will conduct detailed exploration of a wide variety of interests, including the study of genetics, reproduction and cloning, exploring the Periodic Table and calculating chemical reactions and examining electricity and the wavelengths of the Electromagnetic Spectrum.
