KS3 Science Club

Last Thursday was an exciting day for our KS3 Biologists! They used pieces of candy to make a DNA model. They then gathered around to build the largest Compton DNA, with a size of 2.84 metres!   

DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid, is a long molecule that uses four chemicals called nucleotides to encode the data needed to build and maintain an organism. Our KS3 Biologists have used different colours of candy to represent each of these chemicals. To build the Compton DNA model, students added pairs of sweets to cocktail sticks, they then attached each end of the cocktail sticks to their liquorice. Once they had a long enough string, they twisted it to give the spiral shape of a double helix.

This activity enabled students to get a sense of what DNA is like and how it encodes life. They will be looking at this in more detail as part of their GCSEs’ and in A-level Biology and Chemistry.  

A big thank you to our Y12 scientists (Pratik, Somersby and Jasmine) for their help!