International Women in Engineering Day

This week we have been celebrating International Women in Engineering Day, shining a spotlight on inspirational female engineers and inspiring girls to become the next generation of female engineers.

Part of our mission has been to facilitate conversations around science, engineering and technology, and to inspire young women. As a girls' school we are incredibly proud of the strong, independent and brave women that leave Royal High School Bath, who feel determined to take whichever path they choose.

Earlier in the week year 8 took part in a tower challenge. For the team challenge, students had to plan and execute the building of a tower out of card, which was over 75cm tall and could hold 40g of weight. Each group had to plan their building project, use their allocated budget to purchase building materials and then build their planned tower ready for judging. It turns out some shapes are stronger than others!

20 students mixed Y10 and Y12 students who have an interest in some form of engineering but mainly medical engineering, were invited to take part in a day focusing on Prosthetics. Alumnna Harriet Cornick – Orthotist/Prosthetist for the NHS led the day.

Harriet explained the history of prosthetics and talked about how technology is now advancing the way prosthetics is designed. The students learnt about body scanning and what this looks like on their medical CAD package, and they had the opportunity to play with Microprocessing and Myo-electric hands before being given 3 real life design briefs that Harriet and her team have worked on.

In Teams of 4 they selected one of the 3 briefs:

• Design a terminal device to help a below elbow prosthetic user to play a musical instrument of your choice
• Design a terminal device to help a user go kayaking or stand up paddle boarding?
• Design a terminal device to help a user go mountain biking

The students spent the day designing and rapid modelling whilst problem solving and critical thinking at all times. The way the students were working was an exact replica of how Harriet and her team work to come up with solutions for their patients.

All students rose to the complex challenges and worked as a team in just 3.5 hours to design, model, test refine their ideas as well as creating a presentation of their idea. Harriet said the students were already on par with the critical thinking to her design team. The students presented with such clarity to demonstrate their learning not only from their modelling and testing but knowledge they had learnt from Harriet. It was extremely difficult for Mrs Reynolds and Harriet to pick a winning team.

The day finished with local engineers BMT, Marine engineers and Integral Engineering giving talks to inform and inspire the students about different forms of engineering, as well as Alumna Kaat Van Assche, who joined us on Teams to talk to us about her PHD in surgical engineering in Belgium.