Scientific day squashing tomatoes

We have had the pleasure of hosting over 300 pupils from our local primary schools who have taken part in our Squashed Tomato Challenge.

Glebelands Year 7 and 8 students also had the opportunity to take part in an inter-form challenge within the school.

Teams of pupils had to design a trolley to slide down a ropeway carrying the fragile cargo of 20 cherry tomatoes which would crash into the station at the bottom. They needed to ensure that the tomatoes did not get squashed by designing a suitable trolley that was strong, lightweight and provided good protection from the impact. They also had to work within a budget and a tight timeframe to complete the challenge.

It was amazing to see the ingenuity that the youngsters came up with, which included a brilliant array of different ideas from a limited number of resources. Amazingly most tomatoes survived, however a number were also lost en route! The room had a real buzz as the teams waited to see if their trolley would survive the plummet to the bottom of the ropeway.

As Glebelands School has a Science and Mathematics Specialism we take the promotion of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects very seriously, and this gives us an opportunity to engage and inspire our students and primary pupils, showing them the possibilities that these subjects can offer.

It was a great opportunity for the pupils to do some experiments that they do not get to do on a day to day basis in school, hopefully motivating some children to take a real interest in the field of Science and Engineering.

Teachers that were accompanying the pupils said “It was a great opportunity to see the children working through a challenge and developing the teamwork needed to succeed”. Pupils said how much they had enjoyed the day and one asked if he could come back again tomorrow!

It was a real pleasure to see all the local primary schools taking part and I hope that they have all gone back having enjoyed themselves and learnt something new in the process.

Report and pictures contributed by Mr Stefan Radwanski, Head of Science.