29 March 2017
On Friday, as part of the ATOM Festival, nine second year boys walked over to Larkmead School to spend a day being 'engineers' and pit their wits against four other local schools.
Their first challenge was to design and make a wind turbine rotor using Knex and card. This was then tested with a hair dryer and the output power recorded. One of our teams (aptly named Brunel's Hat) was the run away winner with their unique cone-shaped blades. The next challenge was to build a structure for the rotor to be mounted on using just ten pieces of paper. This was also subjected to the hair dryer test and given marks out of ten for stability and design. The quantity of Selotape seemed to be the biggest factor from where Mrs Griffiths was standing!
The afternoon was spent designing an aerodynamic shell for an electric car and then once again constructing and testing the designs. Our cars were temperamental but one did get into the final. A fun and instructive day.