The Bloodhound supersonic car project has always been about inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists. But the Microbit Rocket Car Challenge has taken that aim to the next level. Billed as the largest Stem contest ever run, the Race for the Line BBC Microbit Model Rocket Car Competition, for which the finals were held on
5 July, involved 10,000 teams from 550 secondary schools.
The contest required students aged between 11 and 16 to shape a blue foam block into an aerodynamic vehicle and then add an axle and wheels. The Microbit, a small inexpensive computer that is programmed over the internet, would then be inserted into the rocket car to record its fastest speeds, average speeds and changes in thrust.
The cars were raced at regional hubs with timing gates, supervised by trained staff from the local educational body or the army, which this year was a main sponsor of the competition. The 25 fastest cars went through to the national final, which was held at the Santa Pod Raceways in Northamptonshire.
The winners were two teams from the Littlehampton Academy – Slim Jim and Charlie’s Chariot of Fire – plus one from Kennet School in Berkshire – Dobby Doodles. Three cash prizes of £1,000, £500 and £250 were presented, and the winners will be taken to Newquay airport to see Bloodhound SSC test runs. All the finalists get their school’s name printed on the tailfin of the Bloodhound car.
Classroom activities
In the run-up to the competition, a seven-week guide to support classroom exercises was available for teachers to download, while further resources were available online to support engagement in other aspects of the project.
Aulden Dunipace, education director for Bloodhound, says that the competition links to several parts of the Stem curriculum, blending physics, maths, engineering, electronics and software development. “It’s exciting and engaging for a student to design and build their own car and propel it across the playground at up to 15mph. It leads to all sorts of pathways that a teacher can engage in.”
Resources were available to help the teams link the data from the Microbit’s accelerometer to a computer for tweaking the car, and an air launcher was available for practice runs. Microsoft provided teaching content for coding and computer science. There were also resources to help teachers run Stem clubs to beat world records. The current world record in the 400m category was 534mph.
The entire Rocket Car Competition, including the times, the leader boards and communities for different schools, ran off a “cloud-based social learning environment” called Dendrite. The software platform, which was initially developed outside of Bloodhound but rebuilt in 2014 specifically for the project’s educational outreach, aims to support Stem learning for the next 15-20 years.
Dendrite is the backbone of the competition’s website, and hosts the documents about how to take part and the teaching resources that link the Microbit to the curriculum.
Global reach
“We want to reach schools anywhere on the planet – from China and South Africa to the UK – with Bloodhound,” says Dunipace. “Dendrite helps us achieve that. It’s designed for education. It’s a social media platform to link the business community to schools, and provide high-quality learning and education tools.”
The first application of Dendrite has been to support the army’s recruitment strategy, as the infrastructure for the Rocket Car Competition. Dunipace has great hopes that Dendrite will form the basis of other educational programmes, and believes the platform links businesses and education in an innovative way.
“The national exam system is not delivering the skills employers need,” he says. “Dendrite aligns a key Stem employer in the region to the education system, and can be the catalyst that links business with schools to create a dialogue.”
Each rocket car kit costs £6.50, and each school had about 10 kits, making the cost of sponsoring the competition affordable for small local firms. This aspect was a key part of the competition’s strategy, and Dunipace hopes it will attract many more firms to support the outreach programme.
“The competition is regional and affordable – each hub can have its own sponsor. It’s great for small firms, and we need more sponsors at this level,” he says.
Nevertheless, Bloodhound is also seeking big sponsors for next year’s Rocket Car Competition, which promises to be bigger and better, with the top prize of attending the actual Bloodhound SSC 1,000mph run in South Africa.
The goal is to attract 1,000 secondary schools and 2,500 primary schools, with each secondary school inviting its feeder schools to participate. The rocket car “season” will also last longer – it started in September and will finish next April. “Bloodhound is setting the bar for Stem engagement really low. The school doesn’t have to spend a penny to get involved. We want to make it as easy as possible,” says Dunipace.
Bloodhound’s aim to inspire children into Stem has always been at the core of the project. It’s too early to judge the effect of the Rocket Car Competition, but the project has already been running for almost 10 years – is there any positive effect on science and engineering yet?
He says the only measure he is comfortable with is the engagement figure, and the only data Bloodhound has so far relates to the roadshow that toured schools in 2014, equipped with K’NEX kits of the car, air rocket cars and “desert challenges”, which simulated running the Bloodhound South Africa camp during the record attempt.
Positive effect
The students who took part in the roadshow have made their GCSE choices about triple-award science. The average uptake of triple-award science in schools that had the roadshow is 45%, against 25% in those that didn’t have it – a figure that Dunipace says shows the positive effect Bloodhound can have.
However, it could be that schools participating in the roadshow were already more likely to be engaged with Stem. “It doesn’t matter. If your outcome is to get more engagement in science, the way you achieve that is to get students involved in more practical, hands-on programmes,” says Dunipace. “There are lots of really fun projects, whether it’s F1 in schools or Bloodhound – it’s the end result that matters.”
He adds that he often sees the “Bloodhound effect”. Perhaps the most satisfying, he says, is seeing a group of 11-year-old girls in a school beating all the groups of boys, or further education students who tell him after an event that they are choosing engineering instead of hairdressing. A questionnaire after a Bloodhound school event showed that 78% of the participants wanted to continue with Stem. “It creates a spark of interest that a teacher can run with,” he says.
Dunipace is also confident that this spark will outlast the lifetime of the Bloodhound record attempt. After the 1,000mph run, the car will go on its “1,000mph tour” of the country, visiting schools and events with the engineers. The team expects this tour to last for five years, to create an educational legacy. By that time, he hopes that the Dendrite platform, and the relationships it has fostered between business and education, will have developed enough to live on for use in other projects.
• For more information on how to sponsor 2017’s Rocket Car Competition, or to help out at the race hubs, contact: seema.quraishi@bloodhoundssc.com