Sunday, 26 September 2021

Chemistry Challenge 2021 results announced

The results of the RSC Belgium Chemistry Challenge 2021 were announced at our webinar event with John O'Donoghue on 'Chemistry in the Movies' on the evening of 23 September 2021. As for last year, due to COVID19 rules, this year's Chemistry Challenge was also a virtual event that was undertaken remotely by students at their schools.

For the 2021 Challenge, we received entries from the majority of our group of international and European schools in the Brussels area and beyond and, as ever, the Challenge was designed to test the student's chemical knowledge and initiative.

The RSC Belgium Chemical Challenge has three sections:

  • A chemistry multiple choice paper (Section A)
  • A structured questions on chemistry (Section B), and
  • A 'Thinking Matters' paper that is not chemistry based (Section C)

The top results were as follows:

Section A - Multiple choice

First prize for this section was shared by Marcus Waterson from the European School in Mol (ESMol) and Ito Yurie from the British School of Brussels in Tervuren (BSB) who each receive a €50 award. 

There were three winners of €25 second prizes: Matilde Malagodi of St John’s International School in Waterloo (St John's), and Julie Petermans and Hannah Haris of BSB.

Third prizes of €10 went to Vladislav Morozov and Mels Leurs of BSB and Maria Shopova from European School Brussels IV in Laeken (EEB4).

Section B - Structured questions

In this section the first prize of €50 was awarded to Vladislav Morozov of BSB with Marcus Waterson of ESMol and Ito Yurie of BSB picking up second prizes worth €25. A third prize of €10 was awarded to Sungbin Yun from BSB.

Section C - Thinking Matters

For this section the top prize of €50 went to Lilia Kautz of EEB4, with BSB's Rosanne Roberts picking up a second prize of €25, and three third places worth €10 awarded to Antoni Tokaj of St. George’s International School in Luxembourg (St George's), Maria Shopova from EEB4 and Ito Yurie of BSB.

The Keith Price Prize

With excellent performances in both chemistry sections, this year's Keith Price Prize was jointly claimed by Marcus Waterson of ESMol (pictured below) and Ito Yurie of BSB (pictured above), who both received an additional €100. 

Well done to everyone who took part in this year's Chemistry Challenge! Every student that entered the competition receives a certificate of participation. And, of course, we will be running the Challenge again in 2022 and look forward to further widening participation!

Chemistry in the Movies

On the evening of Thursday 23 September 2021 RSC Belgium members and friends were treated to an entertaining and informative talk from Dr. John O'Donoghue of Trinity College Dublin on 'Chemistry in the Movies'. The webinar was also the occasion for the announcement of the prize-winners in our 2021 Chemistry Challenge.


John's snappy talk took a scientific and filmographic look at how chemistry and chemists have been portrayed in the movies - the good, the bad and the ugly - using short clips and simplified graphics to talk about the subject in an engaging and light-hearted format. The movies chosen were based around a number of themes; problem solving, plot devices, chemical companies and people. 

John noted that the 2021 Ig Noble Prize for Chemistry had just been awarded on 9 September to a group of scientists who had analysed the air inside movie theatres to test whether the odours produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience was watching. Remarkably they did manage to correlate a number of chemicals with different scene types!

Breaking Bad effect

One interesting issue that John explored was whether the TV series Breaking Bad (2008 - 2013) [Netflix, Prime] had an effect on how chemistry is on portrayed on screen? He concluded that it did have a positive effect in terms of showing more chemistry on screen and improving the quality of scientific explanation generally, but it may have also contributed to a new cliché for how chemical scientists are depicted on screen.

Details about where and how to access the movies discussed was also be provided (Netflix, YouTube, Apple etc - see below) and John hoped his talk gave participants the inspiration to start their our own chemistry movie marathon! 

The talk certainly inspired a good discussion with plenty of additional movie suggestions and we hear that some teachers will be looking to incorporate 'chemical movies' in to their lessons.

Movie list

The movies discussed in John's talk in various categories were:

Fictional bad (evil) pharmaceutical and chemical companies 

Good chemistry for problem solving

Good chemists, bad chemistry… and Sean Connery

Science teachers inspiring for Good

Superhero movies

Children’s movies

For all the films listed above, the link takes you to the IMDB listing for the movie, the year of release is in the normal brackets, and streaming service(s) where you can access the film are listed in the square brackets. Enjoy!

About John

Dr John O’Donoghue is the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Education Coordinator for Ireland supports trainee and established science teachers through continuous professional development (CPD) and new resources. He is based at the School of Chemistry in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) where he teaches chemistry to non-science students and coordinates the unique chemistry education and public engagement (EPE) course for PhD students. He has over 15 years of experience in science communication and in recognition of his achievements, he was greeted by the President of Ireland at the 2017 St. Patricks Day Honours event and was awarded the 2018 Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) “Outstanding Contribution to STEM Communication” National Award. 

We hope to welcome John over to Belgium during 2022 for a schools tour of his Spectroscopy in a Suitcase workshops.