The standard was incredibly high this year, with many entries making the final short list. Mr Hazelwood judged this year’s entries and came up with an overall top three ranking. Emilie G came in third place for an excellent model with sound effects and Ilana B took second place for an outstanding cross section complete with full annotations and lovely additional details such as Reginald the Rat. Theo H, Will B and Rafe C came first with their life-size trench system construction alongside a film of the trenches and a filmed reconstruction of a trench attack.

Congratulations to all of the winners, who will receive Amazon vouchers as a prize.

The Dyson building has seen even more collaboration between departments at the start of this academic year. Art, Science, Computing and Maths have all joined forces to deliver some spectacular GAP’s STEAM activities. Students have begun many projects including; an interactive conductive paint wall, bath bomb making, satellite tracking systems, VEX and Lego robotics, F24 electric cars, 3D printing, Electronics and the processes of architecture.

The VEX robotic teams are preparing for regional competitions in January for the ‘Spin up’ challenge this year. The Lego robotics teams are preparing their Sumo bots for a robotics competition in Estonia next year.

From January we will welcome over 600 students from 36 Norfolk primary schools, who will take part in the STEAM Outreach Competition that was highly successful last year.

Any questions please email [email protected]

On Wed 14^th September the Year 12 IB pupils completed their Group 4 Project in Science.

This project is a collaborative investigation where students are placed in groups and work together to design and carry out a scientific experiment into a given theme. This is a compulsory part of the IB qualification, teaching valuable skills such as teamwork, communication, presentation and the scientific method.

This year the theme was ‘Power and Energy’. The students can interpret this theme however they wish and unlike other lessons where they are given a protocol, with this project they design their own experiments. They were given 2 hours on the Saturday before the practical day to do this and submit their requests and carried out the investigation on the following Wed. This year we had a variety of different experiments on this theme, including:

• Which fruit/vegetable makes the best projectile?
• Does a wind tunnel increase electricity output?
• Do the angle and shape of blades on a wind turbine effect electricity generated?
• Which foods contain the most stored energy?
• Which fuels contain the most energy per gram and are the most efficient to use?
• How does changing the layers of cling film in a home-made solar pizza oven affect the time to prepare a melted marshmallow biscuit?

The students then prepared a presentation and presented their data in a ‘symposium’ style, with students from across the school coming round to discuss their investigation with them. The students then celebrated completing the project with a pizza evening with Mrs Futter. This was a huge success and the students worked fantastically well together, producing some excellent projects in such a short period of time. It was a great opportunity for the new IB cohort to get to know each other and new friendships were made. Well done to everybody involved and thanks to the Science teaching and technical staff for all of their hard work in making this such a success.

Recently, some of our pupils participated in a regional VEX robotics competition at Nottingham University. They showed fantastic resilience, resourcefulness and teamwork at the event and we were so pleased to reach the semi-finals.

In our Makerspace, pupils have continued to develop the electric cars that will soon be racing at race tracks nationally against other schools. Students have been experimenting with a wide variety of projects including drone designing; building and racing; soldering stereo speakers and making casings; and developing self-levitating fly-wheels.

This year’s STEAM week was a great success. Pupils from across the Senior School had the opportunity to take part in various activities, ranging from a paper plane competition to hearing from one of our OGs, who is the Aerodynamicist for F1 McLaren Racing. Further activities included:

• Michelle and Charlotte from Canham Consulting joined us in the Makerspace to discuss roles in the Engineering industry whilst supporting Junior and Senior pupils while they made paper planes.

• OG Kunz Chow gave a talk to Senior and Junior pupils on his role as an Aerodynamicist for F1 McLaren Racing. He even brought some real F1 kit that the pupils loved – including a helmet that Fernando Alonso has used!

• Junior and Senior pupils took part in a paper plane competition to see who could make and throw a paper plane the furthest through the Dyson Building. Winners received a trophy and vouchers.

• We welcomed Emma and Liz from Costain to give an inspiring talk during chapel on the HS2 project and to promote STEAM industries to female pupils. Emma and Liz then joined lessons in the Dyson building for relaxed Q & A sessions.

• Marcus Stead-Hall gave a talk during the Wednesday evening of STEAM week on his role as a Simulation performance engineer for Red Bull Racing and he gave advice on the best educational route for pupils aspiring towards similar roles. Over 100 pupils attended this meeting online from 5 different local schools.

Careers and the STEAM coordinator worked closely for STEAM week to organise a variety of industry speakers throughout the week and a careers fair which all Houses and pupils attended to showcase to pupils the diverse variety of roles and employment within STEAM. Twenty-seven employers, including nine OGs attended from creative, engineering, environment, conservation, medical, aviation, construction, renewable energy, science, technology, aerospace services sectors to talk to pupils about their projects and day-to-day work. This gave pupils an opportunity to understand more about how their STEAM education may be reflected in potential careers in industry.

If you would like further information on the STEAM Fair please contact Head of Careers, Sue Osborne at [email protected]

Video created by the Gresham’s Digital Leaders

For our recent production of The Little Shop of Horrors, Animatronic Audrey II was created through a collaboration between the Drama, Art and Computing departments, with Anna P S and Chloe-Leila G particularly involved. The plant pot contains a web server running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which was powered by Li-ion batteries during the performances; a separate set of batteries was used to power the servo motors. This is a fantastic example of a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths (STEAM) education.

The Animatronic Audrey II is currently on display in the Dyson Building, where pupils have the chance to control it using the school wifi network. Pressing the buttons on the web page sends HTTP commands to the web server, which are then queued for execution by a separate thread in the server application.

Since the start of September pupils have enjoyed a vast range of STEAM activities and there are many more to come throughout this academic year for our Senior, Prep, Pre-Prep and Nursery pupils, as well as external primary and secondary school pupils.

GAPs

Activities that are ongoing:

• Vex Robotics.
• Electric car building and racing.
• Painting and glass art with Chemistry.
• Science practical skills.
• Electronics
• 3D Printing.
• Lego robotics.
• Artificial Intelligence Robotics (Pose estimation and AI cars).
• Arduino and Raspberry Pi programming.

Activities starting soon:

• Drone building and racing.
• Building a remote control Mars rover.
• Sensing circuits.
• Crest Awards.

Prep School

Pupils have been attending sessions in the Makerspace on a Saturday afternoon to build and fly a power glider in groups. They will compete to see who can build a glider that will fly the furthest from one full capacitor discharge.

Pre-Prep and Nursery

Pupils have been attending session in the Makerspace on a Friday morning. Activities have included making LED torches, making an art masterpiece with robots and dancing along to a robot song that reception pupils have learnt. STEAM Ambassadors from the senior school have been supporting this activity with vigour.

STEAM Week

STEAM week will soon be upon us. Activities range from a paper plane competition, talks with F1 engineers to a STEAM Careers fair with over 30 businesses attending (parents are more than welcome to attend this on the Friday) and a trip to Thursford Collection and light displays. Please see below for a list of activities:

STEAM Outreach

From February 2022 we will welcome over 600 pupils from 30 local primary schools to the Dyson Building. Gresham’s staff will run a series of engaging activities with groups of pupils on a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Activities will include robotics, model boat building and rocket car building. Pupils that were enthusiastic, engaged and performed well will be invited back in the summer holiday for a final competition with prizes for winning students (and T-Shirts for all!).

We have been in close communication with the James Dyson Foundation and they will soon be bringing Dyson Institute graduates to work alongside our pupils at the Senior and Prep schools. We continue to grow our community of ‘STEAM Ambassadors’ and we are also seeing some of our first students going ‘rogue’ with STEAM projects throughout the Dyson building.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact Mr Hazelwood – [email protected].