By Isabella P, Year 12

Over the past few months, a team of Year 12 students from NHEHS, Isabella, Alex, Rahel, Olivia FC, Imen and Ash, have been working on the EDT Industrial Cadets Gold Project, an initiative designed to give students hands-on experience tackling real-world engineering challenges.

Under the guidance of our mentor engineers, Harrison and Fabricio from Arcadis, we have been designing a pedestrian and cycle bridge to span Clippers Quay in Salford, Greater Manchester. The project requires us to consider a range of factors, including sustainability, stakeholder needs, cost, construction feasibility, maintenance, and future adaptability. Before Christmas, we visited the Arcadis office in Fenchurch Street, where our mentors helped us refine our plans and make significant progress on the design in preparation for our trip to UCL.

This January, we spent two days at UCL’s MechSpace Workshops, where we had the exciting opportunity to build a physical model of our bridge. During our time at UCL, we toured the university, met other teams working on similar projects, and saw some of the fascinating research and projects that undergraduate engineering students are involved in including the student team’s rocket design. One of the highlights was also seeing Bentham’s ‘auto-icon’ on the tour and hearing from a current student what life at UCL was like.

By the end of our time at the workshop, we’d laser cut and 3D printed our bridge design!

A massive thank you to Mr Lawrence for taking us and to all the students at  UCL for helping us out!