Posted 19 March 2019

On Friday 15th March 5 Year 10 girls from Bradford Academy spent the day at the University of Leeds learning about many different strands of Engineering, as part of Leeds Festival of Science. The students were able to understand many different areas of work which require engineers and get involved in practical, hands-on activities working with PhD Students and lecturers in these fields.

 

Session 1: Planning a Low Carbon Future
Students worked using a map of West Yorkshire, along with limited funds, to propose plans for the government to implement new technology in the area to increase the use of renewable resources.

 

Session 2: Managing Nuclear Waste
Students witnessed a modelling technique used by PhD students to simulate the storage of nuclear waste and discussed the current issues surrounding this and the research being carried out to solve this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Session 3: Programming Robots
Students worked with programmable robots and learned how to issue commands and – even managing to programme a robot to search for and follow a particular object.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Session 4: Testing flood defences
Students used small scale models to simulate flooding and weighed up the effects of different flood defences with their draw backs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Session 5: Fixing broken bones
Students got to practice creating an external fixation to fix a break or fracture in a bone, and learned how engineers can work in a medical setting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, all students thoroughly enjoyed the day and learned a lot about how engineering degrees could be applied in research or industry after university.

Catherine Garbutt
HEPO, Bradford Academy