How to get primary school pupils interested in STEM

“If all the colours of the rainbow mixed together make white light, what happens when you mix red light with purple light?” I fell silent. Despite a PhD and career built on applied physics, a seven-year-old pupil’s simple question threw me off guard, forcing me to admit, “I don’t know!” 

Attitudes towards STEM and career aspirations begin forming during primary school, research consistently shows. Young children are inherently curious and creative. They take risks, question the world around them, and ask the questions that even experts don’t think about.

And yet university outreach activities often prioritise older students in secondary schools, with many academics feeling underprepared to work with younger pupils.

So how can universities and academics rethink outreach to communicate complex ideas to children? Here’s what I’ve learned over almost a decade of delivering physics outreach in UK primary schools.

Cut the jargon

Reducing technical jargon does not mean “dumbing down” your content. Learning scientific language is an intrinsic part of primary science education but it needs to be done carefully. 

Consider how you can use your activity to teach scientific words, rather than just remove them, to increase your activity’s educational value. This is particularly important for words that carry different meanings in everyday contexts, such as “current”, “tissue” and “absorption”. 

For example, instead of saying “Light is absorbed by your hand and creates a shadow”, you could say, “Your hand stops light travelling through it and creates a shadow – this is called absorption”.

Keep it real

Do you have any real-world examples that relate to children’s everyday lives and experiences to bring the concept to life? Is there a simple experiment you can bring into the classroom? 

Some STEM subjects lend themselves to practical experiments with minimal thought. Others, like physics, suffer from a “Just trust me that this happens” attitude to learning, which can discourage inquisitive minds. 

For example, refraction of visible light can be demonstrated by putting a pencil in a glass of water and observing from the side (it looks broken), or by noting what happens to a drawing placed in a clear plastic bag when dunked under water (it disappears!)

The presence of UV light can be demonstrated by leaving coloured sugar paper with objects placed on it out in the sun, and the big “why is the sky blue?” question can be approached by slowly adding milk to water in a clear jar under the light of a torch. 

All these examples use everyday, low-cost items – a vital consideration for schools with limited budgets.

Analogies relating to the everyday experiences of children can also help them connect to complex scientific principles that they have seen in the experiments.

You can explain the refraction experiments by asking a class to think about how a scooter with two front wheels might change direction if one of its front wheels scooted through a puddle and slowed down, while the other remained on dry ground and continued to move at the same speed. 

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Connect and listen

When visiting a school, speak to the teacher and take an interest in the children, the teachers and the local community. 

You should find out if there are any children with additional needs to ensure inclusivity. You could also find out how experienced or confident their teachers are in science, what they are currently teaching, what school resources are available and the demographics of the students. 

When working with children, active listening skills are vital. Pay close attention to non-verbal cues to understand how the students are experiencing your content. You might not get it right the first time but you can improve. 

Effective outreach with primary school children is not about delivering perfect explanations. It’s about creating confidence, curiosity and connection at a formative stage in children’s understanding of science and who it is for.

Importantly, it can be deeply rewarding for academics too. The look of fascination when a young child connects with science for the first time cannot be understated, and whenever I witness it, I’m transported back to the moment a seven-year-old dared to ask a question that stopped me in my tracks!

Charlotte Maughan Jones is lecturer in engineering education at the UCL Centre for Engineering Education. 

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