Science songwriters of the future honoured by peers

Last Friday CASA's Martin Zaltz Austwick visited Irchester Community Primary School in Northamptonshire to award Fran, Chloe, Megan and Jess a silver medal in the Science Songwriter OF THE FUTURE competition, a national competition to find young science songwriters.

Dr Zaltz Austwick set up the competition with Hayley Bennett from Geekpop over the summer of 2012, using his winnings from his participation in I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out Of Here! in March this year. Entrants (18 or younger) had to submit original songs about science, to be judged by a panel including 6Music's Tom Robinson and musician and star of TV Isy Suttie. The winner, Vincent Lim, came to the Green Man festival to help run a songwriting workshop. But in a very close second place were the girls from year 6 at Irchester Primary School.

They've been helping to run Lab 13, a project to bring real science to primary schools, ably assisted by scientist-in-residence Jennifer Hogan. With 8 members in total, the Lab 13 committee design their own experiments, raise money for their materials, manage lab resources and take questions about science from all over their school, devising experiments to answer them. Apparently the worst thing about lab 13 is "you can't be in it forever", at least according to young scientist and songwriter Jess.

The songwriters were presented with their medals in a surprise prizegiving in their school assembly.