Schools Marine Challenge goes national
The South East Schools Marine Challenge, which has been successfully challenging kids across the region to engineer methanol, electric and solar powered boats and compete against each other on race day has now become a national competition.
The new exciting Solar Challenge project, Formula Sun, is to design, build, test and race model boats powered by solar energy. The solar class of boat has always been popular with schools for a variety of reasons, including it being an economical and green project and the least problematic in terms of producing reliable boats.
It can be as simple or as technical as the school chooses, depending on the age and capabilities of the students and the amount of time they have to put into the project. The best news of all on this front however, is that it doesn't matter how land-locked a school is, as only a small amount of water is required to test the boats and hold school based races - unlike the IC and electric boats which require a Lake!
Teams compete in three rounds of Hull design and manufacture, Powertrain and Teamwork to design build and race boats powered by solar energy alone. Popular delivery methods include: club activity, curriculum project or a combination of both, one day challenge, primary links scheme, open day event or even staff training day activity.
Formula Sun is tailored to fit the engineering curriculum requirements enabling both individual projects and team delivery to take place side by side. This gives considerable scope for a context when pupils carry out work that requires them to engage with employers as part of their course, finding out about both technical and developmental aspects of working in industry. Schools can build their own tanks to enable testing, evaluation and development to take place.
This year the final race day will take place at either the London or Southampton Internatonal Boat Show. The official launch for this new competition will take place at the Tullet Prebon London International Boat Show on 12th January 2010.
For further information contact Rob Austin on +44 01869 819582 or email info@formulaschools.com
Alternatively log onto http://www.schoolsmarine.com/
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