Students Flying High    

Ross Barton, Chelsee Duncan, George Jackson, Lukas Koncakivskij, Simone Storr, Ester Vincatassin (Year 10), Amy Edwards, Sam Twomey, Jonathan Wood (Year 11), Holly Greenfield and Jamie McWaters (sixth form).

Year 10 set their sights high in more ways than one last week when they enjoyed a Business & Enterprise Day facilitated by local companies.

One group of students was challenged by graduate engineers and communications experts from Thales, who set them a mission to be "Spies in the Sky". They were asked to design a Flying Stealth Vehicle that would be fast, attractive and environmentally friendly for a top-secret mission, and then present a pod-cast and a bid in support of their particular design.

Using an assortment of cutting-edge materials such as paper, card, balloons and paper-clips, the students divided into rival teams and applied themselves to fulfilling requirements within a fixed budget. As their vehicles really did need to fly, this required a lot of preliminary research into aerodynamics using the web and some carefully worked out design work before the prototypes were ready. The climax of the afternoon was the launching of the vehicles with a compressed-air pump, resulting in some spectacular flights across the school hall!

Meanwhile, the rest of the year group also had to scale the heights in their challenge for the day, which was divided into two parts spanning the millennium! Their activities were managed by businessdynamics and representatives from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Legal and General and HSBC, who firstly asked the students to be project engineers for a medieval bridge building contractor. The students had to present a five-minute tender to include the total cost of the project (in Bronze Bits), time to completion, a company name and a sales slogan.

It was then time to come firmly into the twenty-first century and do some real-life building. A theme park required a new roller-coaster ride and the students had to construct this, again using paper, sellotape and the like. Their "gravity run" had to successfully carry a marble (representing a passenger on a death-defying ride) from one end to the other, passing through a variety of thrilling twists and turns.

Mrs Jo Waddingham, Head of Specialism at the school, commented afterwards, "We would like to thank Thales, Camouflaged Learning, businessdynamics, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Legal and General and HSBC for supporting our students' learning with these excellent activities.

"We are delighted that the dedicated Partnership Learning Centre which forms part of our new school build will enable us to further develop our collaborative links with local companies. This will benefit both our students and the Crawley area community.

"Whilst on the topic of the Partnership Learning Centre, we would also like to warmly thank Thales for their donation towards our 'Buy A Brick' fundraising initiative in support of our new build."