Thursday
Prep School Day - the Bloodhound K’nex Air Powered Car Challenge
On the Thursday of Design Week prep school pupils supported by their DT subject leaders and support staff tackled the k’nex air rocket challenge and were given a tour of the Bloodhound Education car.
Mrs McSween, Head of DT at St John’s Prep, Northwood, writes; “During Design Week, prep school students supported by their DT subject leaders and support staff tackled the K’nex air rocket challenge and were given a tour of the new DT facilities and the Bloodhound Education car. The boys who accompanied me described our ‘Bloodhound day’ at Merchant Taylors' as ‘the best school day ever!’. It was fantastic to meet some of the Bloodhound team and listen to their plans for breaking the land speed record in the supersonic car they are building. The boys enjoyed having a go themselves at building a rocket-powered car from K’nex and racing them against boys from other schools. Thank you to all of the DT team at MTS for making this event such a great success. We hope that the new building can be the truly inspirational place it sets out to be for many generations to come.
The Great British Make-Off
The Great British Make-Off was run over four days of design week at lunchtimes culminating in the final on Thursday. Following judging of each day’s event two Houses would leave the competition. The first challenge was to create a tower as tall as possible from Post-it notes and a reel of masking tape. Andrewes and Clive fell by the wayside as White built the tallest tower and Mulcaster the most beautiful.
The next day was an aesthetics challenge, the six remaining Houses creating unique plant-pot garden scenes from paper clips, pipe cleaners and other random bits of stationary. Ms. Lumsden judged Mulcaster to be the winner, Spenser and White had headed for the changing rooms.
With four Houses left for the semi-final, teams were tasked to engineer the tallest weight-bearing tower from 50 pipe cleaners and 25 paper clips, at least 500 mm from the ground. This round was very close, with Walter losing by a single gram weight. They were given their marching orders along with Mulcaster, going out in what some considered controversial circumstances; Manor was victorious and felt confident facing Andrewes in the final.
The location for the testing of the final event was the Outdoor Learning Area of at the back of the Design Centre. The challenge facing Manor and Andrewes was the egg drop challenge with finalists building structures to protect an egg dropped from the outdoor balcony. Owing to the talent shown by young engineers over the previous three days it was not a surprise when eggs dropped by both finalists survived. The competition then went to a design-off with Manor House winning as their design solution was adjudged the more elegant.
To conclude, the inaugural Great British Make-Off was a fantastic House competition which was enthusiastically supported by students, staff and visitors to Design Week.
Nick Gore and the Recycleabike team - Bike Build-Off
At the Thursday evening twilight session, two teams of fifth form DT students built identical bikes under the watchful eye of the Recycleabike team in the Geoffrey Cox On-going Projects Workshop. The event was kindly supported and judged by Dr. Bethan Stallwood and Ms. Felicity Pace, who concurred that those building the white bike had worked together best as a team.
Abbie Hutty, Senior Spacecraft Structures Engineer, ExoMars Rover Project, & Young Woman Engineer of the Year 2013, gave a short presentation on her passion for Engineering as a student, the opportunities the world of Engineering has afforded her and what some of her friends have done since their graduation. Assembled parents, visitors and students were treated to images of the projects Abbie has been involved in, including her most recent challenge the ExoMars Rover Project due to be launched in 2018.
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