Cardiff Racing Team spends the day with aspiring primary school pupils

Staff and students from the Cardiff School of Engineering have been working with St Patrick’s RC Primary School in Grangetown, Cardiff, to demonstrate careers they can aspire to when “grown up”.

Around 300 pupils aged 5 to 11 years, including the Nurturing Group, took part in the event which gave them the opportunity to talk to staff and students, and to get to examine a real student built racing car.

Technician Lee Treherne, and Cardiff Racing Team students, Ryan Marks, Michelle Davis, Allen Ross and Aaron Cockerill, showed the children key parts of the car; tyres, brakes, suspension, and chassis, and explained how brakes work, how fast the car is,  and what materials are used to make the car light and fast.

This technical information is explained in terms the children can understand eg brakes work like crab claws grasping a spinning disc, or the weight of a car is equal to two elephants while our car is an elephants leg.

Throughout the day the school students also got to ask lots of questions and were also able to sit in the car in the driver’s seat and try on the safety helmets. The Cardiff Racing team also showed the students inside the car engine and explained how that works.

As well as hands on interaction and demonstrations, maths and science were also part of the presentation and the children were told how we need to do “hundreds of sums” in order to build the car, and use our knowledge of science to select materials and build the engine,

The academic head of the Cardiff University Racing Team, Dr Rhys Pullin, said “It was a fantastic day. We hope that the children saw how maths can be used to create exciting things like racing cars and that maths and science are not just for the classroom. The children were really interested and asked us lots of questions. I think that we enjoyed the day as much as they did.”

To end the day, the school pupils were all given a poster and a colouring activity sheet designed by one of the team, Michelle Davis. Each pupil has been asked to draw a design for a paper car and the winners, who will be chosen this Friday, will win a set of Lego.