Future Engineers for Stannah?

For the 8th year in a row, Stannah has provided support to Portway Junior School, helping the Year 5 students with their Engineering and Science projects. The support was two-fold – (i) the supply of basic craft materials, but more importantly (ii) the 16 volunteers from across Stannah’s  Andover sites who gave up their time for this activity.

This year’s theme was the 2016 Rio Olympics. Each team was tasked with designing and building a scale model of a sports equipment transporter. All of the designs were highly creative and showed a great deal of thought in the planning stages. The Stannah volunteers acted as advisors to their allocated team and helped with solving some of the building challenges that occurred  with such creative designs. They also ensured that the children worked in a safe manner at all times in line with Stannah’s core value ‘we take care’.

Across the two days of Monday 4th and Wednesday 6th July, sixteen teams competed to be the best. Each team had the opportunity to discuss their product with the other teams and explain how it worked.
Each team received a certificate of achievement for their work. 

The Stannah employees agreed that three from the sixteen were worthy of being put forward to a Dragons Den held at the school on 13 July. The panel consisted of 5 senior managers who listened to each team’s ‘pitch’ stating why their product was the best. The Dragons then asked some challenging questions that were all answered with a level of confident knowledge and great enthusiasm. It was definitely a difficult decision to make when agreeing an overall winner.

The prize is a VIP tour of the Stannah Factory in Andover with an opportunity to try-out some of the Stannah products such as a variety of Stairlifts and also Stannah’s Salise Homelift. The Stannah engineering team will also re-create the winning entry using Computer Aided Design techniques (CAD) and produce a prototype of the design using the latest 3-D Printing techniques.

Mike Newman, Group Learning and Development Manager said:
‘This has been a great experience for both the Year 5 students and the Stannah volunteers. Stannah has a rich engineering heritage and we want to instil this in children from an early age. By making the challenge both practical and fun we have been able to engage the hearts and minds of some potential future engineers. We look forward to continuing our strong relationship with Portway Junior School’.