It’s not the taking part, it’s the winning!
November 15th, 2007 by Mindy
The place: The Tower of London. The task: one day to make, market and fire a 13th century siege machine (well a scale model). The Players: 48 14 year old girls from St Martin’s in the Field school (on Wednesday and over the whole of Enterprise Week I reckon just short of 250 young people from all over south London were involved). But Why? For the organisers – The Smallpeice Trust (www.smallpeicetrust.org.uk ) and the London Engineering Project (www.thelep.org.uk) – it was one of many science and engineering related projects that the LEP does with schools all over south London to show how fun, creative and full of opportunity engineering is. And for the girls it was certainly fun, it was certainly creative – I doubt if any 13th century trebuchets were adorned with flowers, the names of the designers and makers and the immortal words “Bang” – they certainly learned to do some things they hadn’t done before – working from plans, using power tools (which in my view should be a lifeskill taught to everyone), but it was also about winning. At the firing (which was as dangerous for us spectators as it was for the mock castle walls as on a few occasions the Trebuchets somehow fired backwards. Always good to have an element of surprise in a siege) the girls really really really wanted their machine to be the best and were using all their powers of persuasion to gain as many points as they could from their 3 fires in order to up their scores and to win.
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