RNAS Culdrose inspiring the engineers of tomorrow

The Air Engineering Team at RNAS Culdrose has been hosting a series of interactive events to inspire the engineers of tomorrow during 2018, the Year of Engineering.

Local schools recently spent the day in one of the Air Station's hangars in a bid to ‘light a spark’ within young minds and open their eyes to a career in Engineering.

It was all part of the ‘Primary Engineers’ programme - a national project aimed at inspiring Primary School aged children and bridging the gap between industry and education.

Royal Navy Engineers from Culdrose also visited local schools to mentor the children and help them to build small vehicles. Then several Cornish schools (Tregolls, Constantine Primary, St Michaels and St Meriadoc) came into the Air Station to test out their inventions.

There were two categories of activity – ‘Apprentice’ where younger pupils produced simple cardboard vehicles which were released down a ramp with the aim of seeing what distance they would travel before stopping.

The second group, ‘Engineer’ involved older children who had to construct a battery powered vehicle on a small wooden chassis powered by an electric motor.

This design didn’t have any steering and the object was to see how straight it would track down a measured course.

Teams presented their vehicle, concept drawings and sketches and were interviewed by Royal Navy Engineers who judged and marked their entry in terms of design, build quality and concept.

Then the testing began to see how well the vehicles worked in practice with the Constantine Primary School Engineers emerging as the winners!

As part of the Government's Year of Engineering programme, the Royal Navy have been actively promoting and sponsoring STEM events up and down the country to assist with the national shortage of engineers and encouraging school children to take a closer look at engineering careers.