The STEM Challenge

In England, the most popular sports are football, rugby and cricket. It’s not often your mates tell you they’re off to watch the handball at the weekend. It’s a relatively unknown sport - despite being exciting and fast-paced and it’s also part of the Olympic Games. Within the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Park, a 7000 seated handball arena is being built. When the Games are over, the plan is to adapt the use of the arena, allowing it to accommodate a range of sports such as badminton, wheelchair basketball and indoor football.
And this is where Appleton Academy STEM Club comes in…………
Our challenge is to present a proposal to 2012 Olympic officials for a new National Handball Centre, with a scale drawing of the outline floor plan. The three core values of the Olympic Movement (Excellence, Friendship and Respect) have inspired our challenge; and the four Paralympic Values (Courage, Determination, Inspiration and Equality) have been at the heart of every team, in the way the STEM club work together and also reflected in the work produced.

We were fortunate enough to have a real life Building Surveyor come and work with the STEM Club. Mr. Phil Spencer (BSc FRICS FBEng); from ‘Profile Consultancy’ in York helped and assisted pupils in completing technical scale drawings. Mr. Spencer was extremely impressed by the response, enthusiasm and application of our STEM club members, he was amazed at the standard of work produced in such a short time by such young pupils – he did this type work in the first year of his degree at University! He will now willingly act as a STEM ambassador for Appleton Academy STEM Club. The scale drawings will form the basis of our Handball arena floor plan as well as results from numerous experiments about which material floor should be used to allow the ‘perfect’ bounce.

Appleton Academy STEM Club is continually growing in numbers – we now have 45 pupils coming each week! Members are now wearing their STEM badges with pride on their school blazers, and remember YOU could join too – see Mrs. Hey or Mr. Coles for a letter.
Further details about our challenge and everything else we do at STEM club can be found on our blog
http://appletonstem.blogspot.com/

……and remember the STEM revolution has already started at Appleton Academy and YOU could be part of it!