One of Helipebs young engineers, Lucy Nichols, recently visited a local school, Elmbridge Junior, to help promote engineering to year 5 and 6 students. The day was spent working with small groups to design and build a lego robot, which had to be programmed and complete a range of functions. The winners had the opportunity to visit Helipebs Controls where they were shown the latest computer programmed machines as well as spending time working with engineers to design 3D models.
Mrs Victoria Toppin, head of year 6 commented "this was a great opportunity for a local company to come into the school and work with our young people. It was also good that we were able to take six of them down to Helipebs to see first hand as to how they use computers in every part of their business. The young people loved their time there and we at the school really appreciate the time and effort put in by Helipebs personnel"
Listed below is a write up that one of the young people wrote about their experience:-
Before Christmas 30 children from years 5 & 6 took part in a Knex challenge. The children chose groups of 3 and they had to build a Lego robot and programmed them to do different challenges. There were 2 groups that won and got to go Helipebs, an engineering company.
On Tuesday 25th March 2014 the six winners, Ben, Ewan, Theo, Isabel, Harriet and Ella took the short journey to Helipebs. We walked down Sisson Road to their office and factory where we signed in and then we met Harry one of the Directors. Then we got a visitor pass and Harry showed us to the board room. He told us about engineering and then we had to put some safety goggles on for the tour around the factory.
First Ron, another one of the Directors, took us to the oldest part of the factory and showed us some of the machines.
There were completely computerized machines for the workers to use. Then, we went to another building where they put the hydraulic cylinders together and painted them. We saw a large cylinder to bend the wing of an aircraft for testing and a typical subsea cylinder used for pumping out oil and gas from under the seabed.
After that, we went to the designing suite and met with some of the engineers and we made Lego models, on the computers. We were split into groups and all got the chance to create our own 3D Lego models. This was really hard but everyone enjoyed the challenge.
Everyone enjoyed the experience and we would like to thank Helipebs for letting us come and see what they do.