Bloodhound Ambassador Roger Hoyle has sent us this report about his first hand experience of Bloodhound exciting young people.
When Dave Rowley asked me to get in touch with Louise Sinclair last autumn it was a jump in the dark, and I didn’t know what to expect. I thought I might be helping some students to build balloon cars, but little did I know that a few months later I would be presenting certificates and giving a talk as Guest of Honour at a school assembly!
Louise is a parent helper at Fullbrook secondary school in Byfleet, Surrey. She has two children at the school in years 11 and 12. Together with some Fullbrook students, Louise had met Richard Noble and Dave Rowley at the Big Bang Show in March last year. Richard’s enthusiasm obviously rubbed off on Louise because she decided to use BLOODHOUND to run a project for Fullbrook and other schools in her area. She arranged for eight year 11 and 12 students from Fullbrook to run workshops in four of their local primary schools using Bloodhound as the theme. The aim of the workshops was twofold – to help the primary students to attain their Junior STEM Leaders Awards and to help the secondary students towards their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. As part of this the primary students would build and race BLOODHOUND balloon cars, interview a STEM professional, and write a report about this together with a letter of application to be a STEM Leader.
My role was to give a short talk with videos at the four primary schools before the workshops, and to help with their balloon cars. The four primary schools were New Haw Community Junior, Pyrford Church of England (Aided) Primary, St Paul’s Primary, and West Byfleet Junior. I was also involved in the STEM professional interviews, which took place at Fullbrook school. It really kept me on my toes recalling my work on Holography and Thermal Imaging to answer the students questions. All of this resulted in quite a busy schedule last autumn and at the start of this year. A comment from one of the Fullbrook students really sums up the excitement of these workshops: “I really enjoyed working with younger children and loved their excitement, it’s so contagious! We had lots of fun choosing which balloons to use; ‘rocket balloons’ were my favourites as they are really long and have lots of power but they can bend backwards which blocks the air flow and then the car stops! We had many bumps in the road throughout the workshops but had lots of fun along the way!”
I was also able to help some of the Fullbrook students as they worked towards their Duke of Edinburgh Awards and one of them submitted an article about this which was published in the Education News section of the BLOODHOUND website (see How a Bloodhound Ambassador has helped me).
The final event was the assembly at Fullbrook to present Junior STEM Leaders certificates to the primary students in front of their parents. I think I was gradually drawn into this! Initially Louise asked me if I wanted to come along to the assembly, then she said she would be happy for me to “say a few words”. Shortly before the events the published programme showed me as the Guest Speaker who would be presenting the certificates! Anyway, although this was quite a daunting prospect, I was most honoured to represent BLOODHOUND in this way and, in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed the event. In fact, overall I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience especially supporting the primary schools as well. Let’s hope we have managed to inspire some young students to take up a career in science and engineering.
The secret of the success of this whole exercise has been the enthusiasm and dedication of Louise Sinclair. She liaised closely with the four primary schools, as well as ensuring that all of the Bloodhound materials were obtained and packaged together, and also coordinated all of the events at Fullbrook as well. Her organisation was faultless. And now she has decided to do it all again next year! So it seems that I will be quite busy again soon…… and I am already looking forward to it.
Roger Hoyle
Bloodhound Ambassador
