News

On Friday 5^th April, Nower Hill welcomed in engineers from a range of companies and disciplines to help 12 groups of Year 9 students complete the Shell Bright Ideas Challenge.

This national competition is designed to ask students to consider the energy challenges that will be faced by cities of the future and to come up with an idea that will help with the increase in demand for environmentally friendly sources of power.

The groups were each assigned an engineer, who’s expertise ranged from chemical to aeronautical and their tasks included researching and reporting on possible issues, considering potential solutions and designing and justifying their final idea.

A school winner was selected from the 12 groups and the entries were then submitted to Shell for judgement as part of the national competition. The school winners were Group 8, consisting of Aysha, Tami, Umair and Teshan, who’s design for an apartment block included vertical forests and an external material that changes colour in the heat in order to regulate the building’s temperature and reduce the need for heating. The runners up were group 3, consisting of Skye, Alyssa, Dia, Jasmine and Adam, who came up with the idea of embedding energy producing pressure pads in roads to harness the kinetic energy of vehicles.

We were extremely impressed with the teamwork and problem solving skills of all of the students and the engineers commented afterwards how well the students had handled the task and worked together to come up with the best solutions.