2018-2019

In July 2018 the following projects were selected to participate in the national finals of the Big Bang Competition. The students presented their projects very well across the three days at Birmingham NEC.

 Reminder of their projects can be found below;

• Luke and Sofia - FP Clean

• Blanka, Ben, Issac and Zac - Mediglue

• Lucas - Oliver Robot

With their Wild-Ed project Eco-Bricks, Millie & Raheem won their class wide competition and were selected to compete against 9 other schools at an event in Manchester. 

Eco-Bricks are plastic bottles filled to capacity with waste single use plastic, this makes a single brick. The plan then was to use these plastic eco-bricks to build planters, this would later lead to the plastic materials no longer being 'single use'. 

The regional North West Big Bang competition was one of the highlights of the year. This year we entered a record eight projects from the UTC and one Project from the Studio and each and every one of them were great ideas. In addition to this there was a stand set up for the school, here a team presented the BRI and the science journal produced.

The students were well organised with their displays and very articulate when discussing their work with judges, moderators and the general public. 

Three of our student’s projects were selected on the day to continue to the national final in Birmingham in March, they are Student-built Spectrophotometer by Ben, Hydro-filtricity by Joe and Sofia and what poisons the fish, poisons you too by Alex and Saule. Alex and Saule were also named ‘Young Scientists of the Year’ by the sponsor of the event, Unilever. This is one of the two most prestigious awards that were presented at the event and is a fantastic achievement for them. There was also an award for ‘most dedicated teachers’ for John Dyer and Sarah Linkman.

After the event ended Engineering UK contacted us separately to request that two more teams to continue through to the national final in Birmingham, they are Calorimeter by Kim and Building Blocks by Rueben, Jake, Elliot and Hunayn.

The students got a lot out of the day with one being offered a work placement and another group offered financial support on their project. Most importantly, all groups had the chance to develop their science communication skills in discussing their work with members of the public, academics and people from a wide range of businesses.

The project Building Blocks was designed by to eliminate the use of fiberglass insulation in modern houses and replace asbestos in older homes. It uses mycelium 'blocks’ as an alternative to other insulation, however this product reduces the hazards that other products have. For example asbestos is carcinogenic and causes asbestosis and when inhaled through the lungs and fiberglass is dangerous to the skin, causing rashes and skin irritation if touched. Mycelium blocks are completely biodegradable and are safe to handle and be around without specialized safety equipment, like that required for other products. This product is also cheap to build with raw materials costing about £ per block and taking less than 10 days to grow with little labor. This would allow the product to be used in large sizes and projects, making them are ideal for new builds. They can also be easily customizable by changing the molds which allow them to be more versatile. The current design is modeled after a construction toy shape so that the blocks slot tgetehr easily and to help blocks bond together more easily.

Kim's project is about making cheap scientific equipment, using easily accessible materials by myself. Specifically a caloremeter; A basic calorimeter consists of an insulated steel container of water containing a combustion chamber in the centre. A thermometer is used to measure the change in water temperature. A calorimeter is a device used to measure the heat release of a chemical reaction (e.g. burning) or physical change (e.g. melting/freezing). The process of measuring this heat is called calorimetry. 

A calorimeter is usually a very expensive, piece of equipment, used to determine the calorific value of a substance (amount of energy per gram when burnt). Kim's original idea was to just build it and then use it to find out if it is more efficient to recycle plastics and burn oil or to burn all plastics and use the oil to create fresh plastics of better quality than the recycled ones. This would also solves the waste pollution problem. In most schools this would have been a literacy task looking up the values and comparing them, however Kim decided that he would find the values himself and only compare them to the literature values and draw conclusions from this.

He has built a prototype calorimeter and been continuously improving it. Currently it is very cheap (£20 – £30) and easy to build however it is currently at 91% accuracy. Kim aims to reach at least try to attain 95% accuracy.

‘Hydro-filtricity’  consists of a water turbine above five pipes containing activated charcoal filters which can be attached to household water outlets and industrial waste facilities (with variation in design to fit the environment). This wastewater will travel downwards into the box and be evenly distributed by the water turbine into the filters while generating small amounts of electricity. 

Sofia’s original project, a finalist in the Big Bang Fair 2019, involved a series of filters (ranging from large filters to sieve and muslin) that could be slotted in and out of a transparent pipe, designed to cooperate with washing machines and sinks. The aim was to reduce microplastics entering the sea from household wastewater. However she encountered some problems regarding water pressure and blockages, which is why we elected to fuse our projects together.

For this project Ben constructed a basic spectrophotometer, this is a device that measures the absorbance and transmittance of a substance by firing a particular wavelength of either visible or UV light through it. Ben's Spectrophotometer uses visible light. 

Unfortunately as with lots if not all scientific apparatus they are fairly expensive costing approximately £1500 for a simple visible light spectrophotometer too over £4000 for complex increasingly accurate UV-Visible light spectrophotometers, and even more expensive for large models. Furthermore little has been done to modernise the device it remained almost completely unchanged from its discovery and wholesale in 1940 to 1970, since then the spectrophotometer has adapted to enable computer connections to the device and near infrared wavelengths, as well as increased accuracy. 

Ben built and tested his spectrophotometer. This was done by testing standard solutions of copper sulphate using both his own model and a comparison with a professional spectrophotometer. To support his project to this Ben used research papers and engineering advice from the internet. He did this to attempt to create a cheaper design for use in schools as many can’t afford the high price tag attached. 

Alex and Saule used school resources and next to no money to establish a potential solution for microplastics. Firstly, they hatched the Artemia in a tank and then set up an experiment to see if they could ingest microplastics. Artemia are filter feeders, meaning they feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water. The hypothesis was that if they feed by straining particles from water then it should apply to microplastics as well. 

The experiment had two jars, one filled with microfibers and the other with UV fluorescent powder.  Alex and Saule used microscopy and fine motor skills to get the microfibers small enough to be able to be ingested by the Artemia. They used microfibers as they expect to find them commonly in our waters, and used UV powder to visualize the microplastics being ingested. The Artemia live in the two jars and then were examined under the microscope the next day. In their final analysis, they examined that the Artemia had successfully ingested the UV powder.  They managed to image proof that it was ingested by the Artemia and it is in its intestine.  This proved their hypothesis.