Last year, Neil was voted the winner of the Safety Zone. Here he tells us what he’s been able to do with his £500 prize money since then…
It’s now been a year since I took part in the March 2015 I’m an Engineer Safety Zone. Participating in the event was great fun, and it was a privilege to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) alongside Philippa, Pete, Paula and Matthew. I also learned a great deal from the experience, so a big thank you again to all involved.
Here’s how I’ve used the £500 prize money over the past year:
The Mysterious Coded Object
I’ve brought together a team of 5 engineers from my company to design, create, and deliver a new, fun, STEM-based activity idea for students — a Puzzle Room. The activity is designed to take around 30-45 minutes for a team of 5 students to complete, and features a series of puzzles and challenges requiring logic, teamwork, and problem solving to beat (think of a game like ClueQuest/Hinthunt, or Crystal Maze challenges, with a STEM influence). The game aims to develop the skills mentioned above in a practical setting, and provide an environment in which learning from the classroom can be applied.
After spending a lot of time brainstorming about themes and concepts, we developed a game with the following theme:
“Professor Stephanie Emerson had secretly been investigating the meaning of life in her research laboratory, but recently went missing under mysterious circumstances. An initial inspection of her laboratory, however, suggests that she had prepared for such a scenario, as she appears to have left behind a series of clues.
Interested STEM adventurers are needed to search the Professor’s laboratory for these clues, and to solve puzzles to investigate her disappearance – and perhaps find out what the she was spending so much of her time researching!
The Professor’s research seems to have been focused on a locked box in the centre of her laboratory. It is thought that entry to this box is in some way connected to mastering the puzzles in the four elemental zones in the room – Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind.
This is all we know… the rest is up to a team of STEM investigators to find out…”
We’ve used the money to buy/create the props necessary for the game. These range from simple items (e.g., locks, boxes, posters), to more complex objects that we have crafted out of wood, plastic, and paint.
The Intriguing Volcano and the Marble Waterfall are just a couple of the puzzles we’ve created.
How exactly these props are used and related to each other is up to the STEM team to discover – I’m not going to reveal that information here! What I will say is that the game makes use of gravity, magnetism, heat conduction, and the electromagnetic spectrum (amongst other things) along the way…
When the props are put together, they form the themed element zones. The Fire Zone and the Earth Zone are pictured below.
The Fire Zone awaits your problem solving skills…
The Earth Zone assembled.
We recently delivered the activity to our local STEM hub, Dundee Science Centre, and are now ready to run the activity with schools in our local area.
I’d like to say a huge thanks to the team that have helped deliver this project: Hollie Struthers, Graham Holden, Sophie Wiehl, and Tom Pepper. It has been a challenging, exciting project to design and deliver, and an opportunity that we have all learned a great deal from.
And finally, it is only due to the prize money from I’m an Engineer that creating this new activity has been possible, so thank you once again for the opportunity. Hopefully the “Puzzle Room” activity we have created will be able to engage many more students in STEM in the near future!
