On 9th February, three pupil design teams from Oundle School’s Third Form (Year 9) took part in the East Anglian Regional Finals of the International ‘F1 in Schools’ competition, with the ‘Quiksilver’ team earning a place in the National Finals Development Class to be held at Silverstone in late March.
The team, comprising Ella Aisher (13), Anastasiya Stankevich (13), Tom Jowitt (13), and Giovanni Bernardi (14) studied marketing, design and manufacture of their cars before racing the cars against opposing teams and answering questions from a panel of judges.
Design and Technology teacher, Marc Livingstone, commented “The Oundle Quiksilver team worked extremely well as a group; each team member had their own individual tasks which they completed to a high quality whilst also supporting each other. They were well organised and ahead of the game and thoroughly deserved to be the winning team.”
About Science and Engineering at Oundle
Since the days of the celebrated Headmaster F. W. Sanderson, arguably the greatest educationalist of his age, Oundle has been recognised as one of the foremost schools for Science and Engineering in the country. 2016 saw the furthering of this vision with the completion of SciTec, incorporating a new Mathematics department as well as a significant upgrade to the Design and Technology department, now known as the Patrick Engineering Centre.
SciTec, an award winning and ground-breaking science complex with sixteen state-of-the-art laboratories, opened in 2007. This latest development, which focused on uniting the subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) philosophically and physically, positions Oundle at the heart of applying Science and Engineering and embraces developments in new fields such as nanotechnology and mechatronics. The aim is to provide ‘practical hands-on experience’, with pupils able to move seamlessly from theory to practice and from pure science to the achievement of workable technology.
The facility, designed to nurture the UK’s next generation of great scientists, puts the School, which lists evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins and astronomer and space scientist Dr Roger Malina among its former pupils, at the forefront of the continuing national drive to tackle the dearth of scientists in the UK.
The original Design and Technology department has been extended and exhaustively refurbished, retaining the ‘large projects’ space for which Oundle is famous and adding two design studios for virtual modelling and prototype development, acoustically segregated from the practical facilities. There is now an advanced manufacturing suite adjacent to the design laboratory, enabling high-tech processes such as metallic/UV cured polymer 3D printing and robotics to be deployed. In addition to the large projects space, five open-plan workshop bays enable pupils to be taught in small groups sharing fixed machinery, whilst new dedicated classrooms for design and theory are easily accessible from the workshops.
As envisaged in the original SciTec design, the new Mathematics department forms the major part of the extension to the SciTec building, completing the architectural aspiration of a grand entrance to SciTec. An internal quadrangle has been created, giving equal status to all disciplines as well as a proper regard to the Adamson Centre opposite, encouraging an interplay between Modern Languages and Science. The extension also provides two new science project rooms adjacent to the current Biology and Chemistry laboratories, enabling experiments and projects to be carried out over a longer time-frame than was currently possible. This will bring particular benefits for pupils working on Extended Project Qualifications (EPQs).