On the 9th February 2015, three teams representing Badminton School arrived at Bradley Stoke Community School to compete with our gliders in the Flying Start Challenge, Bristol Regional Final. Out of the 19 teams from the area the judges had to select three teams who would go through to Grand Final at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in March.
Since October, eight teams from Year 7 have been competing in the South West Flying Start Challenge, with the top three being awarded places in the Regional Final. Over the last four months, all the teams have been mentored by graduates from Rolls Royce who helped us to design and build our gliders and we have learnt a lot from this activity.
Throughout the competition we learnt about the forces and physics involved with flight which will help us in our future studies in science. We also learned about teamwork and co-operating with each other. Although we got to choose which team we wanted to be in, some of us had not had the chance to work closely with the others beforehand. Our team, KKRS Airlines, had a new member join in the middle of the challenge so we had to spend time bringing her up to speed with our designs and ideas. We all worked well together and as a result were able to build a glider that won our team a place at the Regional Final. Our glider flew 9m and came 13th overall in the Regional Final. The other teams did very well with Team Aeronauts coming 1st and Team 02 coming 9th! Team Aeronauts will now be going on to compete in the Grand Final at The Fleet Air Arm Museum in March.
Building the gliders gave us an insight into some of the very varied work of an engineer and this activity has helped shape my ideas about a future possible career in engineering. Personally, I felt that through Flying Start we were all able to learn from each other with laughter and teamwork. I loved the way we were actually able to build our own models to test our ideas which is the best way to learn. By doing Flying Start, we developed our communication and organisational skills as well as furthering our academic knowledge; we really enjoyed it and we all had fun competing in this challenge.
Rose (Year 7)
