It all started with a video: 

The Year 7 classes narrowed down the suspects by way of examining hair samples and fingerprints found at the scene of the crime. They did chromatography tests on all the suspects' pens to see if they matched the pen used to write a note found at the scene, and they also compared handwriting samples of the suspects with the note. Finally they did chemical tests on the liquid found in a coffee cup at the scene and determined that Mrs Wolton was indeed the most likely culprit as she tested positive in all of the tests.

The other focus of science week was mainly on plastic - how it’s made, why we use so much of it and the problem of plastic waste, in particular the large amount of plastic waste that is ending up in the oceans and how it is damaging the creatures that live in the sea.

In lessons, most boys were involved in tagging images for The Plastic Tide project. This is a charity that is working to clean up Britain's beaches by getting rid of the plastic. By tagging the plastic in hundreds of thousands of images of beaches, a computer is being trained by machine learning to recognise plastic on beaches.

Staff in the science department and school kitchen collected a lot of waste plastic during the weeks in the run up to science week. The science department ran a competition to build a useful object out of this waste plastic. During their lunch breaks Year 9s and 10s made some fantastic objects out of the recycled plastic, including a watering can, a robot, a boat, a desk tidy, a suit of armour and a football. The overall winning entry was a speaker for a mobile phone, made by Alex, Sam, Kabir and Ewan.

There was also a competitive house science quiz, with lots of boys supporting. Well done to Ridgeway, the winning house! To round the week, on Friday lunchtime boys in Years 7, 8 and 9 watched the science technicians and teachers perform a variety of demonstrations on the theme of fire and explosions, which the boys loved!

See the full gallery here.