Our Engineering EDT Gold Programme has run for the last 8 years, 4 of which at the Friary, acquiring the generous funding from The Lichfield Conduit Trust.
This programme is part of the King Charles Industrial Cadet scheme and has been assisting schools all around the UK since 1984, encouraging students to collaborate with Engineering companies in producing prototypes to solve real life problems within their work place.
This year our team consisted of Kimi Leigh, Alice Choi, Asha Tsang, Krish Sukhadia, Matthew Allen and Josh Douglas-Boisson, working again with Paul J. Arthur of EATONs Electrical Supplies in Aldridge, as well as school staff in the form of Ms Stubbs, Mr Hutton and Mr Simpson.
The Team had to produce a device that decreased the milling time in a CNC Machine of one nylon plug which is used on oil rigs to prevent the backlash of sparks surrounding the cables in a fuse box, keeping the employees safe at sea. They worked extremely hard giving up over 40 hours over the past 9 months of their own time to design and produce several working prototypes to achieve this, and did so brilliantly. The team designed 4 working prototypes and a final product which not only decreased the time by over 50%, but managed to allow the CNC machine operator to mill 8 nylon plugs in one session, possibly saving the company thousands of pounds each year.
In the final event, on Wednesday 25 June, The Friary team were awarded their Gold Award and came 2nd overall out of over 30 teams in the West Midlands, which the engineering panel said: “was one of the hardest decisions they have had to make in years (25 years for one of the assessors).”
On top of their awards, our school lead, Adel Stubbs, was awarded ‘Teacher of the Year’ nominated by our Mentor, Paul, but the final decision was down to the EDT Team who singled her out for: “her passion and commitment to her students and industrial cadets”.
Looking forward, our school has already secured funding to run another team from September and look forward to another challenge.
Matt Allman, Headteacher, said: “This is an incredible programme, and we are blessed to have such superb industry partners, as well as an excellent in-school team. It is within this framework that our students were then able to excel and we are so proud of their achievement – we know each of them are special talents and it was wonderful to see them flourish in this project. We are already looking forward to our next cohort going through.”
