STEM ambassadors, Simon Goddard, Victoria Stewart, Ravinder Kumar, James Vincent- Smith and Laurence McLauchlan judged designs for our festive sledge making competition.

Vikki, a STEM Ambassador for Atkins was impressed with home-school entries and any sledge with multiple tests recorded ‘a great example of scientific process’.

STEM ambassador Lawrence from Automobile Engineering was particularly impressed that different runners were used by children across different classrooms. He also like the solutions that had been tried, tested and repeated.

Ravinder praised sledges that were innovative and used low-cost materials while Laurence and James were focused on aerodynamic designs with tubular shaped runners.

Sledges with crash barriers to stop collisions were commented on favourably. It was also mentioned that some designs whilst pretty, were less aerodynamic and improvements in this area would increase future scores.

The main difference between sledges that were identified as winning designs were those sledges tested to demonstrate proof of concept. Filling sledges with chocolate also proved to be a huge draw for all judges!

Finally, all sledge makers were awarded a certificate and winners received STEM based prizes. Thanks goes to all teachers, parents and carers who helped and supported the future STEM professionals. Our teacher of the event was Julie Batey who won a book token, and her class of year 3 pupils received a Balloon buggy class set to help them to continue in their STEM winning ways.

Pictures of the winning entries can be viewed here: thestemhub.org.uk/events/report/sledge-challenge