Livestock

Last Wednesday, the 12th of March I had the privilege to take 4 of our Year 9 boys to Plymouth University’s “Great Egg Race” part of their contribution to Science and Engineering Week.

Those of you, like me, who have seen many summers, will remember the innovative BBC engineering competition; for our younger readers it is a bit like a small scale “Scrap Heap Challenge” involving the transportation of an egg.

We arrived at the University with 13 other school teams not knowing what to expect. Soon we were enlightened. Without human intervention they had to transport an egg along a wire stretched between two pylons about 2 meters apart. They were presented with boxes and boxes of all kinds of goodies, a new motor and gearbox and 2.5 hours to come up with a working solution to the problem. After 20 minutes of brainstorming (???????) the teachers were called away and the teams were on their own to complete the project, though they could ask advice from a group of engineering students from the University.

Our team chose to use a propeller on an enormous electric motor to pull the egg from one end to another and it was a real team effort to design and make a working device in the limited time available. Before time was called the machine, built from a mixture of Mecanno, cardboard and springs was assembled and briefly tested.

When it came to the grand play off, with machines competing against each other for speed and reliability we were not among the winners but we didn’t come last either and the machine did work reliably.

Ben Doney, Lewis James, Jack Moir and James Warne did superbly well in representing the school, acted and cooperated as a team and came up with a brilliant design having walked into a room not knowing what to expect.

Well done to them.