British Science Week 2026: Curiosity, Questions and Why It All Matters

British Science Week is back from 6–15 March 2026, a nationwide celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths.

Every year, schools, nurseries, libraries, museums and community groups across the UK get involved. Some go big with whole-school STEM days or weeks. Some run a single afternoon investigation. Others spread things out into the summer term when life feels marginally less chaotic.

There's no “right” way to do British Science Week.

It doesn't have to be elaborate or expensive to be meaningful. In fact, this year's theme gives you plenty of room to keep it refreshingly simple.

British Science Week 2026 Theme: Curiosity – What’s Your Question?

This year’s theme is “Curiosity: What’s your question?”

It’s deliberately open-ended, designed to give schools and settings the flexibility to explore whatever questions matter most to their children or their community.

The official British Science Week 2026 materials talk about putting children in the driving seat and encouraging them to find answers to the questions they genuinely want to understand about the world. For us, that’s where the real impact lies. Not in delivering more facts, but in giving children space to wonder, because curiosity is what inspires the inventors and makers of the future.

At Inventors & Makers, this is our busiest time of year. We’re in schools and nurseries almost every day in March delivering hands-on STEM workshops, watching children test, tweak, rebuild and occasionally dismantle things with enormous enthusiasm. It’s loud, it’s joyful, and our workshops are always rooted in a question.

Because any STEM topic or activity can start with one.

Here are a few curiosity-driven activities we wanted to share for Science Week, mainly because you can explore them with minimal prep and expense.

1. How do boats float?

You’ll need: foil, a tray of water, and some counters (or coins, or marbles).

Give each group a sheet of foil and a simple challenge: Build a boat that can hold the most weight.

Encourage them to think about design rather than just diving in:

• Wide bottoms = larger surface area = more upthrust

• High sides = less water coming in = less added weight

Start by testing straightforward foil boats and investigate how many counters each can hold before sinking.

Then level up. Give children paper cups, craft sticks, straws, tape and cling film and let them redesign. Test and compare their results, discussing why some boats performed better than others.

You've got engineering thinking ✓

You've got scientific reasoning ✓

And yes, you've got a tray of water that will almost certainly need mopping up ✓

2. What’s the best design for a paper plane?

You’ll need: paper. That’s it.

But this is where we sneak in some proper physics and, quite often, discover which children find folding and copying patterns unexpectedly tricky.

Introduce the key forces at play: gravity, thrust, lift and drag. You don't need a lecture, just enough to give their testing some purpose.

Then let children experiment with different folds and designs. You can measure distance, airtime, or even accuracy if you’re feeling brave.

It’s also a brilliant opportunity to talk about controlled variables (or a "fair test"). Change one thing at a time. Test. Observe. Adapt. Try again.

If you want to go all in, you can show them the world-record paper plane designer and his design and let them try folding it themselves. Just be prepared for a sudden surge in competitiveness!

3. What’s the strongest shape for a tower?

You’ll need: sheets of paper, tape and a stack of books.

Challenge each group to build different column shapes:

• A round column

• A square column

• A triangular column

• Any other shaped column if they're feeling creative

Then place books on the top of each to see which withstands the most weight.

Once they’ve tested the obvious shapes, push their thinking a little further. What else could they change? Would using two sheets of paper double the strength? What happens if the column is taller? Or shorter? This is where the discussion gets interesting.

Engineering doesn’t have to mean fancy kits. It means asking, testing, observing and improving.

Bigger Questions

Curiosity doesn't have to stop at practical builds.

You might ask your pupils: Who has had the greatest impact in STEM?

It's a brilliant, and totally subjective, question for discussion.

With KS2, you could explore some of our 100+ diverse STEM Heroes and let groups argue their case, perhaps as a mini debate or in a piece of writing. Who changed the world more? Who solved the biggest problem? Who has had the longest-lasting impact? You might be amazed how seriously they get behind their STEM Hero.

With KS1, our free STEM Stories videos are a great starting point, introducing a selection of inspiring inventors and engineers in a way that's accessible and age-appropriate.

If you'd like ready-to-use, printable, child-friendly STEM Hero resources, you can explore them here.

Curiosity isn't just about how things work. It's also about who made them work, and helping children see that they could be next.

The Big One We’re Tackling This Year: How Does AI Work?

And then there’s the question we simply can’t ignore in 2026: How does AI work?

Children are growing up in a world where artificial intelligence is everywhere. It writes, draws, answers questions and sometimes gets things spectacularly wrong.

If we want children to use AI responsibly and safely, they need to understand one key thing: It isn’t magic.

AI doesn’t “think”. It recognises patterns. It predicts. It uses data. It makes very sophisticated guesses.

This British Science Week, our workshops for Years 1–6 explore artificial intelligence and machine learning in age-appropriate, hands-on ways. Whether we’re in school with you or joining you virtually, we help children understand what’s happening behind the screen so they can approach AI with curiosity rather than blind trust.

If you’d like to see more about our in-person or online AI workshops, you can take a look and enquire here.

Because this particular question isn’t going away.

Make Curiosity the Point

British Science Week doesn’t have to be complicated.

It can be:

• A single brilliant question.

• A slightly soggy foil boat.

• A heated debate about the best inventor.

• A classroom full of paper planes.

If you’re using our STEM Heroes, running one of the challenges above, or tackling your own big questions, we’d genuinely love to hear what you get up to.

Drop us a message. share a photo, tell us what your children asked.

After all, curiosity only grows when we give it space.

And British Science Week is the perfect excuse to do exactly that.

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P.S. If reading this has made you think, this is my favourite bit of teaching, the questioning, the building, the watching children’s eyes light up when something works, then you might want to take a look at what we do beyond British Science Week.

We’re growing our team of Inventioneers across the UK - teachers who run our hands-on STEM workshops and clubs in their own local area, inspiring the next generation of engineers and problem-solvers.

If you’d love to deliver this kind of curiosity-led STEM every week, not just once a year, you can find out more about joining our team here:

👉 inventorsandmakers.com/inventioneers