We were delighted to welcome back our Academy students to Stafford last month for an action-packed couple of days.
During the school’s half–term, Students from Cohort’s 2 and 3 were back on-site in October with The Inspirational Learning Group and volunteer graduates from General Electric Vernova developing their skills and knowledge as aspiring engineers of the future! After ice-breaker activities, our young people were put through their paces with our team.
Introducing our students to The Open Design Project
A key skill for our aspiring engineers to develop throughout the Academy programme is to identify problems and to confidently pitch to stakeholders why this problem should be worked on. The Open Design project provides our young engineers the perfect opportunity to develop these skills.
Across the sessions, the young people worked in teams to identify an issue in their local community and develop a pitch to a local community group or charity whose users are directly affected by the issue. Our aspiring engineers were tasked with developing a project proposal that was:
- Clear and concise
- Persuasive
- Detail oriented
- Professional
Working in their groups, students diligently worked on their problem statement - highlighting the issue that requires improvement and justifying why this is important to their team. They then looked at their target customer and decided who would benefit from the improvement, before pitching their initial ideas to local community groups and businesses who could assist with providing our young people with valuable first hand experience of the identified issue.
Meeting our local charities
We’d like to thank our local charities who gave up their time to meet with our young engineers to provide guidance on their design projects:
Action Cerebral Palsy - registered charity to improve public, professional and political awareness of the issues facing children and young people with cerebral palsy.
Age UK - registered charity providing support, companionship and advice to millions of people each year. They are a strong voice, campaigning with and for older people to champion their rights, needs and wishes.
Staffordshire Wildlife Trust - a local wildlife charity dedicated to looking after Staffordshire’s wildlife and wild places.
In the coming months and sessions, our young people will use the conversations to guide their product design and development and we cannot wait to see what the students devise.
