Engineering Education Scheme - Aston Martin
Girls interested in engineering? Yes - and they are really rather good at it! Here at Shottery, we are enormously proud of our participation in the Engineering Education Scheme, and this year we have the privilege of working with Aston Martin again. Read on for more information about the scheme and also an overview from our teams.
The Engineering Education Scheme in England & Scotland is an EDT Programme which links teams of four Year 12 students and their teacher with local companies to work on real, scientific, engineering and technological problems.
The scheme provides students with an in-depth experience that will enable them to make an informed decision about their future studies and career.
This will be achieved by giving the students, in a 6 month programme;
- Hands-on work experience as part of a team
- Experience of problem solving, working on a project that is relevant to a local company
- Use of a university’s engineering workshops to develop, build and test solutions to the problem
- Professional skills lectures on Communications (written, verbal and visual) and Project Management
- The opportunity to develop technical skills and see school physics, chemistry, technology etc applied in an industrial environment
- An opportunity to meet professional and graduate engineers, scientists and technologists
- Experience in presenting their solution, in a formal verbal presentation and formal written technical report, to a panel of senior professional engineers
Students will also get the opportunity to compete for a British Association (BA) CREST Award.
During their six-month project phase, students are encouraged to show industrial enterprise, creativity and innovation whilst gaining extensive experience of problem-solving, team-working and project management. All key life skills are developed within the context of the world of work.
Personal development education realised through work related learning is at the core of this high quality educational enrichment scheme.
The EES can bring multiple benefits to companies from cost effective project solutions (many EES teams have saved companies tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds) to the opportunity for high quality professional development of the organisation’s engineers and scientists.
The Scheme improves industrial and higher education links and can provide early access to high ability, potential graduate recruits.
- Annually between 1300-1400 students participate in the Scheme (30% of which are female)
- 89% of students go on to read engineering or associated science/IT/technical degrees
- 98% of teachers consider the scheme relevant to education’s needs
- 97% of participating engineers considered the scheme to be relevant to their company’s needs
So, here at Shottery we have two teams of four Year 12 girls - Kate, Parishee, Emma, Eleanor, Hannah, Suki, Rebecca and Hannah, and they are going to be working with Aston Martin to produce a drop test rig to test certain parts of the cars. Here, Suki tells us more:
"In essence, we are dropping parts of weights on to parts of the cars in order to test the components. The drop test rig must be cost-efficient and we have to consider materials and issues which may be presented by the weather, such as rust or air pressure and air resistance. At our first meeting, we discussed three main concepts and designs and have broken down the questions we need to ask our mentors. We have also found ways of measuring and presenting our results and have shared out responsibilities, starting with research tasks. We are really excited and looking forward to quizzing our mentors and sharing our ideas with them!"