A Club is fun. The idea of a Science and Engineering Club is to have fun with science and engineering and explore new ideas. It should be challenging and stretching but not to the point of being off-putting. Science and Engineering Clubs are supposed to be fun and exciting, and should inspire and motivate the young people you work with.
A Club is interesting. Obviously you want the young people to enjoy the Club therefore you need to plan a program that is exciting and interesting to them. Try asking them what they want to do – however, don’t be surprised if the first thing they say is “we want to blow things up”. Instead of giving them a blank page, give them choices between different activities.
A Club is not supposed to be a revision exercise. An out-of-schools-hours Club should not focus on National Tests and Exams. It should be designed to complement and enhance classroom learning. A well-designed programme will increase the confidence of your young people and encourage them to develop new interests and skills. Of course a desired by-product of running a Science and Engineering Club would be to improve SATS and GCSE results.
A Club doesn’t involve lots of writing. We would recommend that Clubs generally contain a minimal amount of writing, although you may want to do a long-term project that does produce written work. Keeping the amount of writing to a minimum means there is more time for experiments, investigation, discussion and reflection. This also supports pupils with different levels of literacy.