“It gave me an insight into how much they have to remember.”Throughout their stay, the students also grappled with the jaw-dropping engineering facts that confronted them at every turn: how the shuttle experiences temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it flies back to Earth, and how half a million gallons of fuel is consumed in the first eight minutes of the mission.Sitting in the control room that sent Apollo 8 to circumnavigate the moon for the first time in 1968, the teenagers saw film footage of how a captivated world experienced it. As they did, their faces filled with the same expressions of wonder as those of a generation nearly four decades before.And on Monday morning, those expressions were even more awestruck, as the group watched the space shuttle, Discovery, with six astronauts on board, landing safely after Nasa’s latest mission.The teenagers relished watching science come alive in front of their eyes. Many thought this would fire a deeper interest on their return home. “I’m definitely going to be even more keen on science now, when I get back to school,’ says Andrea Adamou, 14, from a girls comprehensive in Enfield, north London.But what of the wider picture? These students are aware that their enthusiasm for science puts them in a minuscule minority back home.

At some schools, they were the only pupils, among more than a thousand, who took any interest in the competition. At others, they attracted ridicule for doing “more work” in a “boring subject” This anecdotal evidence is supported by statistics. A-level entries for maths, physics and chemistry have dropped sharply in the past 20 years, while other subjects have soared in popularity. One of the complicated set of contributory factors is the decline of science practical work.John Holman, the director of the Government’s recently opened National Science Learning Centre, at York University, acknowledges this is part of the reason for teenagers becoming turned off from science. “Excessive testing is squeezing out the opportunities to do hands-on science,” he says. “Too many teachers are becoming excessively preoccupied with safety, so that they leave practical elements out of lessons.”His centre, and others around the country, are starting to address this by running extra training sessions for school science teachers to help “reconnect them with the frontiers of science” It’s a much needed start, says Pillinger.

“Don’t just keep asking kids to write things down,” he pleads. “Practical project work makes science much more interesting.”This chimes with the philosophy at Edge. It plans to run a similar schools’ competition, focusing on a different subject, next year, and to repeat the Nasa experience in 2008. Vanessa Miner, Edge’s communications director, is optimistic that the competition can be a catalyst for wider change. “More than 4,000 children entered the competition,” she says.

“The winners will return from this experience as ambassadors for a greater enthusiasm for science.”Simon Clark, 15, from Wellsway School, near Bristol, knows that his school plans to use his team’s success for this purpose. “We want to show everyone that advanced science can be fun,” he says. “It’s not just about lessons with old men with beards in classrooms.”Teachers accompanying the pupils express varying degrees of optimism for the future. Paul Cowley, head of science at Bishop Rawstorne in Lancashire, doubts that one trip, albeit a superb one, can lead to the opening up of science to the masses, and bemoans the way science departments are closing at some universities. But he plans to encourage year-groups, consisting of hundreds of pupils, to get involved in future Edge competitions. Alison Alvarez, head of science at a Tower Hamlets comprehensive in east London, plans to partly reshape the GCSE science curriculum to include several space-related topics, with as much practical work as possible.Mike Grocott, a physics teacher, from Callington Community College in Cornwall, has established a space centre at the school, convinced of the power that space has to enthuse young minds.Watching this year’s competition winners enjoying themselves by the pool after another day immersed in Nasa experiences, he draws a parallel with the first stage of investment in any business project.