Engineering Day

Project Overview

The school instructed TEDCO Enterprise in Education to organise an Industry Day for them with an Engineering Slant as its focus. At time the school were applying for Specialist Status in engineering and wanted the event to support the bid. The school suggested having a carousel of activities however after giving the matter some  thought  it was decided that having one task to complete over the day would be more beneficial as pupils would be able to see a project through form start to finish. We therefore came up with the idea that pupils would design, build and test “something” according to specific guidelines. The day was designed to be a mature, business conference, where pupils would be given respect and gain the feeling of being in control of their own learning and achievements. Experts were brought in to support pupils, allowing pupils to meet and work with professionals from a variety of fields. TEDCO Enterprise in Education managed the day with the support of 6 teachers from Jarrow School.

Business Support

The 2 day event was supported by Karen Gray Ltd., Smartspeed consultants (Engineering specialist), PricewaterhouseCoopers and TDR training (Engineering consultant). These professionals were on hand each day to provide support with engineering principles, business and financial advice, marketing support and presentation skills. Each facilitator had a wealth of knowledge and experience to impart to the pupils. During the day pupils were given talks on engineering principles, forces and motion etc.; finance, marketing and presentation skills.

Identified Needs

The programme was designed to encourage pupils to develop and use enterprise skills through participating in the days’ activities and to encourage team work and individual/personalised learning. Activities provided students with an enjoyable and beneficial event that incorporates target setting, working within a set time frame, an element of risk, an element of financial capability and a competitive element. The event gives pupils the opportunity to work to a project brief which has specific guidelines, yet allows for flexibility and creativity and the opportunity to work with professional facilitators and people from the engineering industry.

Evaluation

Students completed an evaluation form at the end of the session which will give both quantitative and qualitative results when input into the SPSS statistical package. General comments from the day were that they had a lot of fun, they did feel more confident after giving presentations and enjoyed working as a team.
Feedback from the school has been very positive and teachers have commented that the event helped them achieve their Enterprise Agenda, Worked Related Learning and PSHE targets. It has also been reported that pupils have asked to take part in another similar event in the future.