News
Engineering Day Champions
4th March 2010
Six of our budding engineers from Year 11 won the Annual Engineering Challenge Day at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton. Team captain Rory Mangles receives the Fleet Air Arm Engineering Challenge Trophy from Mr Tim Creegan (Education Officer, Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeolviton).
The event was sponsored by the 'Aimhigher' initiative. Team Captain Rory Mangles was extremely well supported by team members Aaron Newbury, Henry Roper, Thomas Sankey, Horace Wong and Edward Williamson. They were competing against eight other local schools, their task was to design and construct a self levelling platform, together with a wooden plane which was to be launched from it by electronic means.
Aaron delivering his sales pitch!
Aaron Newbury was nominated as the team's spokesman and his witty sales pitch did great justice to the team's demonstration – his explanations of the design, the construction and the launch process proved to be impressive!
The moment of truth came and the launch button was pressed, fortunately it worked first time to great acclaim by all the judges and our team went on to win first prize - the new Aimhigher trophy. The moment of truth! Edward and Rory appear a little anxious!
Our Sixth Form team, which took on seven teams from other schools and colleges was determined to match the achievement of Ben Sandy's legendary team which lifted the trophy in 2009. As it happens our team members, Chris Bunker, Magenta Cousins, James Eddey, Musa Konteh, Chris Lau and Emily Mangles, are rather stronger in the humanities than in natural science: in fact the philosophers, historians, and students of literature, psychology and business studies outnumbered the scientists by a ratio of 5:1. This was no reason for dismay: after all the Challenge is intended to test creativity, amongst other things, and you can't get much more creative than psychologically intuitive, business-minded, literate and philosophical historians. Or so we hoped - and so it proved. The team won high marks for the creativity of its concepts and designs. Things got a bit trickier when we moved from the drawing board into the workshop. The challenge was to simulate a ship's flight deck and launching system, providing a stable platform in heavy seas, and it has to be admitted that our prototype was not entirely successful: we will spare you the details. However, thanks to our marketing team whose efforts would have put the most accomplished snake oil salesman to shame we were able to claim a highly creditable third place. We were fairly beaten by two teams from the south coast who evidently spend most of their working and leisure hours mucking around in boats, but we saw off all the other land-lubbers - and, of course, next year we'll be back, with cunning plans and fiendish tricks ……
