BLOODHOUND breaks its first world record.

Today, 27th May 2011, at the Joseph Leckie Community Technology College in Walsall, students raced their miniature BLOODHOUND rocket car into the record books when it streaked across the playground at 88.89 mph. BLOODHOUND team member Gerry Heather was on hand to offer advice and scaled the speed up to the equivalent of a full size car reaching 259 mph! This is a prime example of how the BLOODHOUND Education Programme has been picked up by schools across the UK.

An innovative education event in Preston earlier this year saw 400 primary and secondary school pupils enjoy a hands-on, interactive STEM educational experience which introduced them to the engineering behind Bloodhound.  The collaboration between the Bloodhound team, Institution of Mechanical Engineers members and local engineering employers delivered work-based professional development,  a community lecture and a super learning day for students that established a blue-print for future member-led education events inspired by Bloodhound.

Schools in Solihull were challenged earlier this year to build and run rocket cars, then make a presentation of their project and their knowledge of BLOODHOUND SSC to a panel of judges. With help from Colin Rowe of Rowes Rockets, the schools were given a basic chassis which they could then modify to run as fast as possible on a tethered line.

Four schools took part in the challenge, but only five teams from three of the schools could make it to RAF Cosford for the finals recently.

At Priestlands we are using Bloodhound to inspire and further develop our year 8 project known as Jet Flyers. We have be evolving this project for the past few years using the ‘Mission’ TV documentary based on Thrust SSC. We are now shifting our attention to the use of Bloodhound SSC as our source of inspiration for the pupils. I have included a few photographs of the Jet Flyers to help give you an idea of what we are doing. The pupils are given a block of timber 25mm x 25mm x 250mm. An 18mm diameter piece of dowel is glued into the end of the block of wood.

The Joseph Leckie Community Technical College spotted a Guinness World Record that just had to be broken. This is the story of how they built and ran their model rocket car at great speed across their playground and into the record book.