In June, Renishaw’s education out-reach team attended the Cheltenham Science Festival for the first time.
The six-day festival featured over 200 events and was attended by nearly 10,000 school-children and parents.
The activities on offer ranged from playing with the world’s first gaming robot to building mini
jet engines.
Renishaw (
www.renishaw.com/educationoutreach) ran two activities from its stand in the ‘MakerShack’, an area of the festival dedicated to hands-on workshops.
Visitors could cycle on the company’s ‘energy bike’ exhibit, pedalling for 30sec to try and produce enough energy to illuminate all the light-bulbs, while also generating enough power to run a fan to cool the cyclist and to charge the battery that powers a display screen and printer.
The other activity was making a magnetic spinning top that chases a paperclip along a table, to demonstrates how magnetics, kinetic energy, gyroscopic effect and friction work.
Rebecca Bound, Renishaw education out-reach officer, said: “The hands-on environment of the MakerShack played to
our strengths.
It was great that we could showcase how much fun science can be, using practical activities.
The children really enjoyed becoming engineers and making something they could take home to show their friends and family, emphasising that engineering really is cool!”