DUBBO home-schooled student Ben Connor was able to join 93 other talented science students in year 9 and 10 from across NSW, ACT and Queensland on campus at the University of Sydney to do fun hands-on workshops and lectures in biology, chemistry and physics.
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Held during the last week of the school holidays, the University of Sydney's Science Gifted and Talented Discovery Program entrance exam was sat by 1731 students from 93 schools, with only the top 9.4 per cent of students invited to the workshop.
"Students get the chance to discover different areas of science and get involved with hands-on activities that they wouldn't normally cover in school through the University of Sydney's Gifted and Talented Discovery Program," Faculty of Science school programs co-ordinator, Jess Morris said.
"On the physics day, students will become real physicists by learning about the tools and tricks every physicist uses. They'll discover how the process of physics works, by doing real science with real scientists in our School of Physics.
"From superconductivity to astronomy, students will see the process of physics from start to finish, through experiments and discovery," she said.
"The biology day will focus on eyes with a The eyes have it theme. The eye is the organ of vision, but students will discover that they are more as they look deeply into the eye with the School of Biological Sciences. Eyes are an expression of our genes, a complex collector of light and can often be tricked.
"The chemistry day will see students trying their skills as chemical detectives and learning how to identify chemicals by their colour and appearance.
"The School of Chemistry will run lots of fun experiments such as fingerprinting, spectroscopy, smoke bombs, explosions, liquid nitrogen and much more," said Jess.
"At the end of the last day, there will be a special closing ceremony presentation by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is always hugely popular with the students," Ms Morris said.
"This year we joined forces with Young Scientists of Australia to provide some fun and exciting welcome activities for the students, including a relay quiz, engineering challenge and the popular YSA science show.
"All the activities are fun and the students love it."
The University of Sydney's Science Gifted and Talented Discovery Program has been running since 1996 and has had more 1600 students participate since its inception.
The program runs twice a year for three days each in the July and October school holiday period.
