Children’s interest in science can be piqued at a very young age.
“Science starts in your garden, in your kitchen,” said Jolene van Heerden of the company, Mahle, which drove the engineering challenge hosted this week at Hillcrest Primary School.
Grade 7 pupils from a range of schools in and around Durban entered a competition between teams made up of children with designations ranging from engineer to marketing representatives, to design, build and race cars, Formula One style, made out of paper and driven by compressed air cylinders. It also involved working with sponsorship and marketing, encompassing all the skills one finds in a pit.
“We need to make maths and science fun and exciting,” Van Heerden said, stressing the core purpose of the six-month exercise.
And it did.
“Learning all the aerodynamics of the car itself made it very interesting: learning how the car can go faster if it doesn’t have much ink on it,” said Zaynab Aboobaker from Berea West Primary School.
Holding her team’s paper car, she explained that at first it was square.
“But we wanted to make it a bit different from the others, and unique, so we designed the front to make it look a bit more like a racing car and adjusting where a flap would go led to finding a suitable spot for the sponsors’ logo,” she said.
Array Ramchander, engineer for Pitlochry Primary School’s team dubbed 007, said in designing their car he put what he had learned in geometry into practice.
His “sponsorship manager”, Abheer Munilal, elaborated on the business side: “It taught me how to work with figures and how to do calculations correctly because if you make a mistake while budgeting, while calculating, it can cause you problems. While I was drawing up our budget, when I collected funds for sponsorships, I had to do it correctly and had to double check all the calculations and so forth, because if you make a mess with the calculations, you can cause problems.”
Henre Benson from the facilitating non-profit organisation, Centre for the Advancement of Science and Mathematics Education (CASME), said teams had to be multidimensional and multiskilled.
“We have to have a good project manager to drive that process forward. The marketing and the publicity side of things has to come into play because at the end of the day we are trying replicate, in a way, a real-world business context.
“A racing team has a whole range of skills that make up that team. It’s not just the engineers, not just the drivers.”
He said that the project was meant to be a learning-based opportunity for children to explore the engineering within the automotive centre.
“Any teacher, passionate parent, can get their child engaged in this kind of activity.”
The winners of the first day's events were Eden College, followed by Ekwandeni School and Chelsea Preparatory School. Atholl Heights Primary won yesterday's event, followed by Remount School and Berea West Senior Primary School.
The Independent on Saturday