Science Passion

During our summer holidays, while we were lying on the beach soaked in sunscreen, physics teacher Mr Francis Bryden was in cold wintry Europe.
In 2006 Mr Bryden was granted a scholarship to travel to Europe and investigate the teaching of IT and Physics in schools in Britain.
He left for the UK in January to attend the Association of Science Educators Conference in Birmingham.

"There were more than 3500 people at the conference. Teachers from all over the UK as well as international delegates. It was so big, there were 30 or 40 different events taking place so you had to prioritize what you wanted to see," he says.
While attending the conference, Mr Bryden found St Cuthbert's lived up to its international reputation as a great College.
"I was expecting to see lots of new things that would be highly innovative, but apart from a handful of schools it seemed that we were ahead in terms of development.
Not many schools used IT to the extent we do, they actually seemed to be a bit behind. It was good to see us doing so well on an international scale."

After the UK, Mr Bryden traveled to Geneva to visit the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research) or more commonly known as CERN.
The main function of CERN is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations of scientists.
CERN has almost 3000 full-time employees. Some 6500 scientists and engineers representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities, about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.
"It was absolutely incredible. The particle accelerator is huge and it's designed to accelerate protons and make them collide. The particles that are produced from the collision would be the particles that existed seconds after the big bang. We went into a viewing chamber where you could see this happening, it was bigger than Clouston Hall."
While in Geneva, Mr Bryden also visited the International School of Geneva, which has three campuses and more than 3000 students, to see how physics was taught in a European country.

College Ties August 2007

Mr Francis Bryden inside one of the experiment chambers at CERN in Geneva.