Well what an amazing week this was, even more exciting than we thought it would be! This was an early start for Bloodhound Ambassador Chris Henley who was due at St Michael’s, some forty miles away, at 08:30! This was the nineteenth visit that he had made to schools and other organisations but the first school outside of Wiltshire. He and Mark Elvin began this fantastic week with an assembly introducing The Bloodhound SSC project to all 600 pupils. This introduction was jam-packed with interesting facts, exciting films and very loud noises. It was good to hear the gasps from the children as the incredible numbers relating to the project were revealed. St Michael’s is about ten miles from the Severn Bridge and there seemed to be disbelief in the hall when I told them that Bloodhound would make the journey in thirty-six seconds. We were even lucky enough to have a 1/10 scale model of the actual car. “It looks like a dart” exclaimed one of the Reception pupils, “and its nose is as sharp as a shark’s tooth.” A Year 2 child was so inspired by Mark Elvin’s assembly, I had a surprise delivery; he turned up in my classroom with a 3d model of his Bloodhound SSC.

To get our pupils excited about engineering we brought in the experts from our local community. Throughout the week we were lucky enough to have 5 Bloodhound Ambassadors: Graham, Chris, John, Irfan and Akhil; 1 Bloodhound Design engineer: Mark; 3 parent engineers who had taken time off work to come and help: Mr Cole, Mr Jewell and Mr Hitchin; an A-level Sixth Form Student from Chipping Sodbury called Luke; and Mr Thacker from The City of Bristol College who kindly provided us with 20 of their engineering students and an electric car.

In order to run this week we also required an awful lot of resources; K’NEX, electrical science sets, Bigtrak, 2400 wheels, 1200 axles, 200 balloons, 200 elastic bands, and lots, lots more. We received donations from parents, a very kind donation from our PTFA, and we were also given fantastic resources from Barbara Higginbotham from Data Harvest Group in Bedfordshire to help with this big adventure!

During the week the children learnt how much fun engineering can be. Chris worked with Year 5. He demonstrated that a fluffy feather and a pebble fall at different rates and discussed the reasons why. He then showed them a video of David Scott dropping a feather and a hammer on to the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 and discussed the reason why these two items fell differently from our feather and pebble. It was interesting to hear the various reasons given by the children for the differences. After that each child made paper cones and investigated how they fell and how to make them fall more quickly. Most children soon realised that making the cones narrower made them fall more quickly, and a couple of children came up with a brilliant idea for making particularly narrow cones.

Graham Jeffery worked with Year 3, they watched the Balloon Car Experiment Clip, and then he aided in their designs and helped with the construction; offering them advice based on his vast Rolls Royce engineering background.

John spent the day in Year 4; he was a surprise ambassador addition who turned up on Monday to join the fun! He spent the day with our 90 Year 4 students creating moving vehicles that could withstand the weight of their own power supply; we had a huge array of vehicles.

To aid Year 2 and 3s understanding of ‘drag’ they had the task of guiding eggs safely to earth via bespoke parachutes. Year 5 and 6 got to experience the thrills of chemical reactions, they witnessed a coke fountain taller than their teachers.

 

KS 2 worked as teams to design and build bottle rockets, through the whole week we saw many being launched into the air. Amongst all of his excitement, all pupils were designing and building their own land speed record car to beat their friends; luckily for this task we had enlisted the help of two City of Bristol Engineering students per class. The teachers were exhausted and the classroom floors were lost under boxes and bottles!

On Thursday the children raced against their classmates to find the fastest and furthest cars in their class. The winning cars were entered into the final heats to take place after our school's Jubilee picnic.

The heats had a slight technical problem to start with, having to rely on a loud voice and a whistle! Not a good advert for a technology week!! But once the microphone was working the heats were well underway with great excitement amongst the crowds, all cheering for their friends to win. The support and camaraderie was amazing to see. When balloons popped and elastic bands snapped on the start line we had pupils sacrificing their balloons or elastic bands off their model car to help. After the 'school made' cars, we went onto the cars 'made at home' races. Here we saw ingenious inventions; cars with fans and propellers, catapulted cars, water and air pressured cars, and simple electric motored ones. One child made an amazing car at home and just as he got to the start line his motor died. He just said ‘Never mind’, and cheered his other friends on instead. What an amazing attitude to have. After numerous races and a great deal of tension, we got down to our four winners. All receiving a signed Bloodhound SSC poster.

The Winning Four

Onto the parent races, we had five entrants. These big boys were all taking it very seriously, requesting terrain of the track, distance of run and weather conditions!! We had spinning ones, fizzing coke ones, cars that got Year 6 very wet, and I think we managed to have one that went in a straight line!! Well Done for that! It was great to see parents taking time to make these at home and providing us with a laugh! Let's hope a few more inventors will come out of their garages if we do it again!

It was an amazing week and provided the school with a fantastic buzz of excitement. I am sure that we managed to inspire all of our pupils, and help them to realise that numeracy, science and technology is great fun. I believe our school has many future engineers in the making.

Thank you to Bloodhound SSC, City of Bristol College and St Michael's Parents who supported this week, to all of our children, who were amazing throughout the whole week; and of course to the teachers who threw themselves wholeheartedly into this very exhausting week.

Sally Elvin