MBDA Girls in Engineering Day
Miss G. Hawker, Deputy Curriculum Leader: Design and Technology, writes:
On Friday 19th October, five Year 8 students and I took part in a fantastic opportunity at MBDA in Stevenage. The students took part in an event called ‘Engineer for a Day’. The event is focused on giving girls the opportunity to have a go at being an engineer for the day and work alongside a range of female MBDA engineers.
The girls were given lots of information about MBDA as a company; what they do, what it is like to work for them and the different routes into engineering as a career. During lunch they took part in a personality career quiz which informed the students about potential careers that would suit them. They then got to speak with a variety of female engineers – specifically with one who was a test engineer and gets to work with dynamite!
The main focus of the day was taking part in a real life engineering problem, where the girls had to design, build and test a structure that could transport tomatoes for the farmers in Nepal, where living on the mountainside and getting them to the market involves a long, dangerous walk down the mountain and over a river, at the end of which the tomatoes may well be a bit squashed! The girls did a fantastic job at building and presenting their system (especially when there was a staged earthquake which ‘took’ a major part of the original design!) This year, for the first time, MBDA decided to make all the teachers take part too, so there were two teacher teams also competing against each other. My own team were inspired by the classic board game Mousetrap and this inspired MBDA to run a Mousetrap event in the future!
The day was a truly brilliant experience! It was great for the students to have the freedom to make their own design decisions and build their own design, whilst having the great support from MBDA Engineers, who worked with our girls the whole day.
There was no competitive element to the day but well done to Debora Puscas, Arwen Adriaans, Phoebe Wilkins, Catherine Cranham and Cassandra Sousa for being awarded a CREST Discovery award and being fantastic engineers!