A large cohort of Year 7 and 8 High Prior Attainment (HPA) students took part in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) Experience Day hosted by EDT / UK Space Agency.
The aim of the workshop was to develop teamwork, problem solving, communication and scientific skills and to increase the awareness of the UK's space programme and the career opportunities in Science and Engineering.
In teams, students were given the task of designing, building, testing and costing a moon rover powered by elastic bands. With Sir Winston Churchill's quote "Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm" ringing in their ears, failure was definitely not an option! Helped by a number of Sixth Form volunteer students, there were some fantastic designs, some working better than others but none the less very impressive moon rovers.
Some Year 12 students also had the opportunity of talking to the Stem Ambassadors about their own aspirations of going into the engineering field.
Having the UK Space Agency in school running this workshop certainly created a spark amongst all of the students.
We are looking forward to some more of these STEM workshops in 2020.