Congratulations to our two teams from Years 9 and 10s who were both successful in winning the Royal Navy Secondary Engineering Challenge at the Fleet Air Arm Museum as part of the Schools Programme last month.

The challenge (as part of our STEM programme) encouraged our students to work on a breadth of skills from technical to practical skills, and communication to teamwork.

All challenge set included aspects of design, simple mechanics and electrical circuits and involved students purchasing materials from a pop-up shop, to build their model from scratch. At the end of the day each team had to present a marketing pitch and working model to the ‘customer’.

Mentors were on-hand during the day including current engineers from the museum industry and the Royal Navy.

Our Year 9 team participants were Ru, Brooklyn, Rhys, Meghan, Florie and Matteuz and our Year 10 team were Ola, Barnaby, Oliver, Florence, Felicity and Matty.

Both teams were set the task of engineering a launch platform for an aircraft carrier that would remain stable even in rough seas. They then had to devise a working launch mechanism that could successfully launch a model plane from the platform.

They were competing against groups from other schools and were scored on their design and build phase, testing and presenting.

Our Year 9 team with a most impressive winning score of 487 /500, and they even came in under budget (having to track spending as they ‘bought’ the items they needed for their build).

Our Year 10s also won with an impressive score.

Congratulations to both teams on your achievement.

Thank you to Mrs Radford-James, Miss Dickson and Mrs McMeakin for supporting our students.