Terrific Scientific

Girls in Years 5 and 6 have joined children from around the UK on a national journey of scientific discovery as part of the BBC initiative, Terrific Scientific.

With currently fewer than 15% of 10-14 year olds aspiring to pursue a career as a scientist, leaving the UK with a potential skills shortage, the aim of the initiative is to inspire primary school age pupils to discover their inner scientist. The BBC have partnered with leading universities to create a series of child-friendly nationwide scientific investigations. The data gathered will be sent to the universities and will feed into real academic studies.

The girls were investigating taste and asking the question “does food taste the same to everyone?” The aim was to find out whether the girls were “Supertasters”. Supertasters experience bitter tastes more strongly than other people; this is because they have a higher number of taste receptors within fungiform papillae, the big pink bumps on your tongue which contain your taste buds, enabling you to taste sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. By counting the number of fungiform papillae, it is possible to determine whether a person is a supertaster, taster or non-taster.

In order to carry out the test the girls had to put blue food colouring on their tongues and then counted the number of fungiform papillae (taste buds) they had. They discovered that girls with more taste buds are more likely to dislike bitter food and blue food dye!

The girls followed up their own investigation by joining children from across the country to watch the BBC Live Lesson, finding out how their results compared to others and learning more about how we taste and can learn to like foods.

Prep Science teacher, Mrs Rodgers said, “I was really impressed by the way the girls carried out the Terrific Scientific investigation. They had a great deal of fun identifying what kind of tasters they were and thoroughly enjoyed learning about a new aspect of Science in a fun and interactive way.”