Raytheon Quadcopter Challenge

Miss C Burnham, Curriculum Leader: Design and Technology, writes:

Last Friday our 2017 Quadcopter team (comprising of Year 9 GCSE engineering students, Matthew, Hugo, Izzy, Bryony and Elise) headed off for the launch of the competition. The Quadcopter challenge is a chance for students to participate in a hands-on STEM based engineering challenge to build their own unique, fully operational, unmanned aerial vehicle, known as the Quadcopter. Then, in student teams, they will have to personalise the flight characteristics and customise various components such as the frame design, undercarriage and canopy. Students will get together in their team each week after school and work to build and customise the Quadcopter, ready to fly it around an obstacle course, competing against other teams and schools.

“The Raytheon launch day was an incredible experience. The presentation at the start of the day was very interesting and it showed me that there are a lot more jobs in engineering than I had originally thought. After the presentations, we were then given our Quadcopter kits and we started building. The building of a Quadcopter from scratch was complicated but, by assigning roles for each team member, we managed to do it more efficiently.

Overall the whole day was great fun! It was nice to have the freedom to build what we wanted and make the design decisions ourselves, whilst having the great support from engineers and Raytheon STEM ambassadors.

Now back at school, we need to continue working and developing as a team to start designing the shell for the Quadcopter, which will be a challenge because of all the wiring and the weight. Something which I hope we can work on together as a budding team of engineers.” Matthew Gifford, 9 Hatfield, GCSE engineering student

Reminder – if you want to find out all the news, events and student successes in Design and Technology, follow us on Twitter at @DandTSta