{"id":1019,"date":"2019-02-26T10:44:03","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T10:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/engineering\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2019-02-26T10:44:39","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T10:44:39","slug":"1019-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/engineering\/1019-2\/","title":{"rendered":"UWE student engineers visit Leaders Award winner’s school"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


A team of engineers from UWE Bristol is <\/em>bringing to life<\/em><\/a> one of the winning designs from last year\u2019s <\/em>Leaders Awards<\/em><\/a>. Designed by Philippa Griffiths of <\/em>Hugh Sexey CE Middle School<\/em><\/a> in Somerset, the Red Line Braking System (RLBS) displays red lights to alert other drivers of the severity of the braking and levels of attention needed, with the aim of reducing fatalities on our roads. <\/em>Miriam Cristofoletti<\/em><\/a> tells us more about their visit to the school of designer Phillipa Griffiths in this blog post.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this month we had the incredible opportunity to go and visit Philippa in her school, run a series of STEM activities with her classmates and to discuss her idea about the RLBS project! We were so excited! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After about an\nhour of traveling, we reached Hugh Sexey CE Middle School, in the\nquiet Somerset countryside, and we met Ms Latti (Philippa’s teacher),\nwho took us to the DT classroom and introduced us to the pupils. It was a great\nsurprise to see the majority of them to be girls! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We started with a\nbrief introduction about who we are, what we do at UWE and we had a chat with\nthem about their career plans after school. The students were very interested\nand it was nice to see them interacting with us and sharing their opinions,\nwithout feeling shy. We then had a couple of quizzes. First, we wanted the\nchildren to explore the different areas of Engineering, so we gave them a\nfew job descriptions and they had to guess the job title. We picked the\nlatest job adverts from real websites, in the Engineering sections, like Drone\nPilot, App Developer, Machine Learning Engineer, Virtual Reality Designer,…\nto show them that all these jobs weren’t there a few years ago, but they are\nnow possible because of the new technological advancement. When we said:\n“Think about the fact that you all will have jobs that are not there\nyet, because you haven’t invented them yet!”, a girl from the back went\nlike “Oh my God, THAT-IS-SO-COOL!” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it’s for\nreal, “SO COOL”! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another activity\nwas to see whether they knew some of the most important past and present\nfigures in the Engineering industry and research environment, like Elon Musk\nand Steve Jobs, but also Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson, telling them that\nthey all started from nothing, from a garage or from a little desk, and they\nall built their way up with determination and strength, never giving up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We showed them\nsome of our work and projects at university, and we also brought a Mekamon\n(the spider-like robot produced by Reach Robotics). They were all so\nexcited to see a real robot in front of them, but also interested by the fact\nthat Silas Adekunle, was just an undergraduate student when he came up with the\nidea of building it and set up his own company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, it was time\nto discuss the Leaders Award competition and Philippa’s design. We presented\nher our work from the very first tests and the current progress. She shared\nwith us the reasons behind her idea and she told us her thoughts about what\nwe’ve done so far. It was a great experience for both sides – she managed to\nsee her drawing slowly coming true and give her input about the next\nsteps, and we got the opportunity to have our customer review, avoiding\nfuture errors and\/or disappointment! <\/p>\n\n\n\n