 Hello everyone! It’s Javier, I hope you’re all excited for the run up to Regional finals. This week I am here to give an update on our car development; and other events we have taken part in. This week we have finally managed to finish our car development for this season's Regional finals. Now it's time to produce the final manufacture of our cars ahead of the project submission deadline. This ‘rushed’ development, due to COVID isolation periods, has led to 10 broken front wings, 5 broken rear wings, tether line guide breakages as well as numerous fingers being super glued together. Staying positive has been tough, but hopefully we have now got a final car design that will survive race day, fingers crossed! Over the past few months we have been organising a lecture to be delivered by the Early Careers Event team of our Platinum Sponsor, BAE Systems, to our Year 11 students. This was held in our schools new lecture theatre and was a massive success, we were very happy to have promoted STEM within our school as we know how much BAE Systems’ opportunities can help students like ourselves. We think that this competition offers such great opportunities to inspire others, and any chance we get to promote STEM to others we take. We recently collaborated with up and coming Indian team, Aquila, to record their first ever podcast. We thoroughly enjoyed sharing our experience in the competition so far and we wish them the best of luck, you can listen to the episode here. Collaborating with teams from around the world is one of most fun things to do within the competition as you learn about different cultures and meet some amazing people, it is also a great way to get some ideas for your own team as well as see potential future competition! Don't forget to check your submission deadlines for the Regional finals, they are closely approaching. Try not to leave everything until the last minute, everything always takes longer than you plan it to, there will be things that go wrong, try to finish earlier than the deadline. We do try this and one day may even achieve it ourselves! Keep going and make sure to contact us if you would like any advice, we will help as best as we can. UP NEXT: Next time Maisie will update you on our pit display and verbal presentation progress, and any updates on the car...
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Hi everyone, Maisie here! I hope everyone is well under way preparing for this season's Regional Finals - the deadline is coming around so quick and now seems so, so close! I thought I would give an update on our Verbal Presentation and Pit Display progress, something I have been trying to push forward ready for the submission deadline. After a lot of rehearsals, and performing in front of a number of people to get feedback our verbal presentation aims to be filmed and finished by the end of this month, fingers crossed! With the confirmation that the Regional finals will definitely be virtual, we have been continuing to work with one of our Gold sponsors, Guardian Displays, to produce a design. We are designing something that can eventually be made if we are successful enough to get to the National finals, but still able to show as a concept design for Regionals via CAD drawings and an animated walk through. Tom and Javier are starting to put the car together after more testing, things still keep breaking, their luck continues! Last week a video was posted on F1inSchoolsUK social media about the judging and scrutineering for the competition - feel free to have a look yourselves or contact us via social media for our advice, we love hearing from other teams. This month is a lot of preparation for the Regional finals deadline, so good luck to all teams, this time can be stressful but in the end it’s worth it! UP NEXT: Check out next week's blog for an update from Javier on how our car development is going and some of the recent collaborations we've taken part in!
Hello! It’s Javier. I'm back to give an update on the car and how we have been working together over the easter holidays. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed having a bit of a break but things never stop in the world of F1 in Schools! This week we have again been working on the verbal presentation in hope to get it finalised by the end of the month. We’ve been rehearsing regularly and have another online meeting with our industry expert to help us develop our confidence in public speaking. We have made some progress with our Pit Display, working with Guardian Displays to produce a virtual concept that has the potential to be physical if needs be, if any events are face to face this year, fingers crossed! Working with industry experts in aspects of the competition is a great way of ensuring that your ideas are actually possible, this past couple of weeks have really showed us how important their advice is. Tom and myself are hoping to have our wheels manufactured by our Platinum Sponsor, BAE Systems, by the end of the month in order to get our cars ready for the Regional Finals. Our number one priority is making the car complaint to ensure we don’t lose out on any points during competition day as well as making the car as close to the minimum weight as possible (50g in the professional class). Newton's Second Law tells us that Force = Mass x Acceleration and the only variable we can directly change here is the mass of the car as the force from the power pack is fixed. So, making sure it is as lightweight as possible means that the acceleration can be as high as possible meaning the car reaches its maximum velocity as fast as possible. F1 in Schools UK have a video to get to grips with the specification and scrutineering judging of the car if you are not familiar with this and is linked below in case you might find it helpful. UP NEXT: Find out more on Eclipse’s run up to the virtual regional finals submission deadline...
Hello everyone, Maisie here again! It's great to get back into things now that my exams are over. I'm looking forward to working on my section of the competition once more. This week we are on our Easter break but that doesn't mean we are stopping! Issac and myself had a meeting with our industry professional, Marcus Orlovsky, to work on our individual presentation skills which was then followed by a team meeting to collate everything we have learnt from these sessions. The rest of the team were also given areas to work on in regards to their presentation skills in separate meetings so bringing everything we had learned together was very helpful. I have realised that I need to be a bit more energetic and “waffle” less when it comes to presenting as this can take up quite a bit of presentation time. We also presented to our headteacher in order to gain an outside opinion of our presentation. We feel that it's important to present to as many different people as possible to get different perspectives and pointers for us to work on. Hopefully you can do the same! Javier and Tom have also been busy testing the car and have sent our final wheel designs off to BAE Systems as they are manufacturing them for us. The next thing to do will be to get a start on our portfolios as we have been so busy focussing on other aspects. When we made our first portfolios and presentations it took us forever, however as time has gone on we can build on previous documents which takes less time than starting from scratch - there's a good tip for anyone going into their second season! Hopefully everyone's enjoying a nice rest from school over the Easter period and are coping well with being back at school! UP NEXT: Will Javier and Tom manage to get the cars finished and ready for the Regional finals?
Hi everyone! It's Javier. I thought I would update you on the physical testing myself and Tom have been doing since being back at school. To be honest it hasn't all gone to plan, but as James Dyson says ‘Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success’ I must admit this has been hard to follow! However over the last two weeks we’ve learned a variety of things that will be useful, some of which we would like to share with you. In the lockdown we built, what we thought was, a perfectly clear and structured plan for the return to school on how to test our car from developments made in virtual analysis. On returning to school soon we realised that in reality things take longer than you think they will. Deadlines we set ourselves were obviously too optimistic and were missed, things break, rooms aren’t available, people get ill, etc. When we do this again we will of course create a logically structured plan but minimise chance for errors to occur and even have ideas of a contingency plan that could be used if a big error occurs! Disappointingly we had quite a few issues with track testing. We recently stayed after school to set up our homemade 20m track. During this session we had a few ‘explosions’ with parts flying off in all directions. We have now learned about the importance of ‘just because it looks good and works in CAD doesn’t mean it works in the real world.’ Firstly because some parts may very easily break (as was common with us) and secondly as the tolerance of 3D printing means the physical model may be bigger or smaller than expected.  Despite this we, of course, did not give up! We love a challenge. We soon returned to test on our smaller 10m track which meant we could test more components in a shorter amount of time. As well as this we learned from our mistakes and re-designed some CAD to later re-print them to test. However, this wasn’t enough… As you can see from the image below it was pretty frustrating. The car snapped! This was very unexpected as we would expect compression not shear of the car due to it hitting the front of the body directly head on. Although these are some major setbacks we had figured out how we will realistically be able to develop our Regionals car and gained a vast amount of knowledge. What’s the point in testing if you don’t learn anything? Following what real F1 teams do, we are working ahead on the Eclipse car and are treating this as one big development for the future. UP NEXT: Tune in with Maisie to find out more information on how we plan to finish our verbal presentation, portfolios and pit display before the regional final submission deadline.
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Maisie and Javier
'Eclipse' Queen Elizabeths Grammar School, Kent Archives
August 2021
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