This year, the Year 7 pupils at Radnor House have been involved in the Race for the Line competition.

It is the largest STEM initiative in the World where over 4000 schools are involved.

The competition has been inspired by the Bloodhound Supersonic Car which is hoping to beat the standing land speed record in October this year. The Bloodhound is hoping to achieve over 1000mph.

Our pupils have been challenged over the last few months to design their own rocket cars to race against each other in small teams.

Starting off with a simple 30cm long foam block our pupils have designed, built and tested their own model rocket cars.

Last week the external organisers of Race for the Line came to the school to set up our race day.

Our year 7 pupils witnessed their amazing feats of engineering blasting along a wire and through some timing gates in spectacular fashion.

Each car carried its own Micro:bit ‘accelerometer’ which gathered vital data to determine which team was the fastest. The fastest car travelled at a whopping 37.72 mph. The winning team was ‘Unicorn Airlines’. If one of our top teams have a speed that beats all cars in our region we will go through to the next round. Fingers crossed.

Pupils have had exciting lessons in Science, Maths and Computing to link up their knowledge and thinking skills in this amazing engineering project. They have experimented with streamlining and looked at the forces involved, they have drawn scale drawings in Maths lessons, programmed their accelerometers in IT and extracted data to help them with their design improvements.

As a result of this challenge our pupils have developed oracy and numeracy skills, the ability to work in a team, and have displayed the qualities highlighted by our core values at Radnor House.

Going forward, we are planning to use the gathered data from each Micro:bit with our year 7 classes. The idea is to teach students how to use spreadsheets making sure we have live and relevant data. 

If you are interested in finding out more please follow us on Twitter @rh7stem. 

I’d like to thank TGC International Ltd for sponsoring this project and for inspiring our future generation of Scientists, Technologists, Engineers and Mathematicians.

Andrew Richardson

Head of STEM