In July students from Maiden Erlegh School participated in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) day at Bracknell and Wokingham College as part of the silver programme.

George, 8E1, reports:

After we got off the minibus, we entered the college and into the sports hall where all the school students were sitting. After the different activities for the day were explained to us (a vehicle challenge, a robot programming challenge, a diagnostics challenge and an e-fit challenge), we were given a sticker with an number (E.G: A5) and "A"s were sent to Diagnostics, "B"s to vehicle "C"s to Robot and "D"s to E-Fit.

My group consisted of Cameron and myself from Maiden Erlegh and 2 Year 9 girls named Charlie and Jasmine from another school. The e-fit brief was to look at someone's face (in this case Mr Newton) and reconstruct it using the e-fit software which 95% of police departments use. Unfortunately our reconstruction did not look very much like Mr Newton and we came third out of the three groups that attempted this challenge!

After beak we went to the robot challenge where we programmed Lego robots to move over a map, collecting red squares and yellow stars and avoiding black boxes.. We came 4^th out of 6, getting 5 points in 40 seconds. Then we ate our packed lunch and went to the vehicle challenge. In this challenge we had to create a vehicle out of some wheels, a motor, some elastic bands and some rods. It had to travel a distance of approximately one metre. Our vehicle came second in the group and third overall with a time of 1.43 seconds.

Finally we went back into the sports hall where the awards were given out and then made our way back home.