Year 8 Faraday Challenge
On Wednesday 13th November, two teams of six Year 8 students took part in a Faraday Challenge Competition (supported by the Institution for Engineering and Technology) at Nonsuch High School. Our students competed against students from Wallington Girls and Nonsuch. The purpose of the day was to respond to a design brief and create a product that would benefit a user of the team's choice. It was a broad brief, but our students developed excellent responses.
All of our students performed exceptionally well, with one team from CHSG winning the overall day. They will now be placed on a national leader board with the possibility of reaching the national finals in June next year.
The joy that was shown when the students realised that they had won against the grammar schools was wonderful to witness.
Well done to all the students that took part.
Mrs Pearce
The Faraday Challenge was such an exciting experience! When our teacher told us we were going to spend a whole day building things and solving real-life problems, I felt super excited and a bit nervous, too. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew it had something to do with engineering, which sounded cool. We got split into teams, and I ended up with three classmates I didn’t know very well. At first, we were all a bit quiet, but once we started talking about ideas, everyone got into it. We were given a challenge to solve, and our goal was to create something useful out of the materials they gave us.
Our team spent a lot of time just brainstorming and figuring out the best way to approach the challenge. We had to think about things like how it would work, how to make it stand out, and even how much each material would cost. I didn’t realise that engineering included so many different parts! My favourite part was when we actually got to build our solution. We had a craft knife, scissors, foam, and some other bits and pieces. Putting everything together was harder than we thought, especially when working out how to create a working circuit, but it was amazing to see our ideas turn into something real. It took a lot of patience, especially when things didn’t work exactly how we planned, but it felt awesome to keep going and find ways to improve our design.
At the end of the day, we had to present our work to the judges and explain our idea. We were really nervous because we did think ours was the best after we saw others showcase theirs. The judges asked us questions about our design, and it was cool to explain how we came up with the solution and what each of us worked on. In the end, we did win, and we were so proud of what we made and how well our team worked together. Doing the Faraday Challenge taught us that engineering is about creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving. We would enjoy doing something like this again one day!
Isabella L, 8R2
