The UNE Discovery Voyager team have welcomed some new team members in the last couple of months and we’re pleased to be right back into visiting schools in northern NSW and hitting the roads full steam ahead.

One of our most recent trips took us all the way to Boomi and Boggabilla where we facilitated science activities with the wonderful students at two of the smaller schools in the region.  There were many moments of enlightenment and wonder during the Astrometrics and Palaeontology Puzzles activities at Boomi Central School. Students learnt about the planets, and used model planets to construct a to-scale solar system on the school oval. They also learnt about fossils and dug up some bones in a mock palaeontological dig site. It was a super fun day, with lots of fantastic questions from the young scientists.

Boomi is just over 4 hours away from Armidale and about an hour north-west of Moree, very close to the NSW and Queensland border. Boomi is known for its artesian baths so if you’re ever travelling that way, make sure you call in. With a population of around 200 people, it was an absolute pleasure to visit Boomi Public School and engage with a lovely group of students.

From Boomi, we headed over to Boggabilla, which is about 10 minutes south of Goondiwindi in QLD. The students at Boggabilla Central School also enjoyed the Palaeontology Puzzles activity and then took on our Dynamic Bodies activity, which was a wonderful experience in learning about the dynamics of the human body. The young scientists at Boggabilla school were very excited to find out just how fast they can run, and how high they can jump. The high school students enjoyed the ‘Weighing Giants’ activity, using plasticine to reconstruct dinosaur models and then calculating just how heavy their model dinosaur would have weighed in real life. Boggabilla has a population of around 500 and the name Boggabilla comes from Gamilaraay bagaaybila, meaning “full of creeks”. We loved our visit to Boggabilla and hope we can return to both schools again in the future