Future Engineers in Action

On Monday 30 January, St Christopher’s Senior School held the F1 in Schools Season 1 Final. This was the first school based F1 competition to be held this academic year. The competition has been re-structured this year, to allow maximum opportunity for students at St Christopher’s to compete in this prestigious engineering competition. Over the last two months, the students have formed teams of four consisting of a Design Engineer, a Manufacturing Engineer, a Project Manager and a Commercial Manager. The teams were given the challenge to design and make a CO2 powered F1 car from Balsa Wood and 3D printed parts as well as creating two portfolios to illustrate both the Engineering and Enterprise elements of their teams development and preparing a visual display of their work. On the evening, all the teams involved provided a two minute verbal presentation relating to their team as well as creating a promotional video for the audience to watch. There were four teams involved in Season 1. Two of the teams (The Force and Enigma) represented Year 9, while Team Velocity and Sauroris represented Years 10 and 12 respectively. The competition was tremendous and it came down to the final knock-out race to decide who the winners would be. On the night, Enigma ran out winners by six points over Team Velocity. Engima have worked brilliantly over the last number of weeks and thoroughly deserved their win. Engima consists of Project Manager Ryan Stephen, Commercial Manager Fritz Tautenhahn, Design Engineer Chaitanya Prakash and Manufacturing Engineer Hamza Mounir. All four teams who competed will make it through to Season 3 and will have the opportunity to compete with the top four teams from Season 2. A special mention to Charlie Axtel and Kamilah El Kanfoudi from The Force as our only female competitors in F1 in Schools Season 1. It is fantastic to see girls taking part in Engineering competitions and, hopefully, we will see numbers increase in the near future. Many thanks to all the parents for their support, and our wonderful F1 in Schools team for organising the event.