A group of Year 10 students have been working on a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) project related to planes. Felix and Olly took part and tell us about the project:
‘To start off our paper planes project, 15 students were excused from afternoon lessons and met inside a Tech classroom. When making our planes, we were given a template and used it to make the paper flying plane. There were very particular instructions, and some teams had some difficulties but in only one hour which felt like five minutes it was time to test them. We went outside and some planes proved to be more successful than others, however, we only had time to make a few minor adjustments before our time was up. This meant that whatever we had was put forward to the test in the RAF hanger, where we saw what was going to happen to our recently made paper planes.
When we arrived at RAF Marham, we did a brief trek past old decommissioned planes to a huge construction hanger. We were taken to a little side office room where we left our bags. We then got led back into the main part of the hanger. After a brief talk we split up into school groups and rotated around 8 different stalls for 10 mins each. The stalls included a life raft and safety equipment team, ejection and gun maintenance team, a stool where we could tweak our planes and pick the best to go into the final, motorsport and distant photography team, bomb building team, managing department, mechanic and electronic team, Science team with liquid oxygen and the repairing team. We got 10 mins on each stand where we participated in interactive activities and explanations.
After our final stand, it was time for lunch! After lunch we gathered round the runway and where Northgate’s plane and the planes of other schools were to be thrown. We had to aim for the start of the runway which was marked by a point. We were the only school to get all of our throws to land on the runway but unluckily for us, Downham Market snatched the victory by getting 2.3 cm away from the target declaring them the winners. We then had a school photo in front of RAF Marham’s motorsport vehicles and started to head home.
Overall it was a really good day!!!!
