Over the last few weeks Year 9 learners have been working on a STEM project in their engineering lessons set by JCB. The Year 9 learners were provided with a JCB digger kit but with no instructions or fastenings provided. Working in teams learners had to figure out how to assemble the models, order additional parts and overcome issues they found with the model. The initial build took an average of over 2 hours, those groups that made in into the final reduced the build time to just 15 minutes. During the STEM project, learners work with staff from JCB and those that made it through to the finals have to present their models to the staff along with their written instructions and diagrams explaining how the completed the build.
Learners said:
“We really appreciate the opportunity to work on a real project. It was hard at first and a little overwhelming to not have any instructions, we did not know where to start!”
“It was more fun to figure it out and solve problems for ourselves.”
“We are really pleased with our final build and have learnt a lot about making decisions and solving problems from this project.”
It was a very close final with all teams having very good build times which made it difficult to select an overall winner. Staff had to look at the main objective, which was to create a set of instructions to build the model but also consider build time, team work and presentation skills. The winning team not only had clear written instructions but drawings, parts lists and even a contents page.
