FEMM Hub inspires young people at STEM school event
Members of the FEMM Hub were pleased to be able to take part in the ‘Get Up To Speed with STEM’ outreach event at Magna Science Adventure Centre recently.
This regional showcase aims to engage young people in all matters relating to innovation, design and manufacturing in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), and it returned to Magna following its enforced two-year break due to the pandemic.
This year there were over 4,000 people registered to attend from 72 schools across Yorkshire and Derbyshire. They were treated to fun and interactive exhibits from a wide variety of employers, businesses and education providers highlighting the wealth of opportunities in STEM.
The FEMM Hub attended as part of the Discover STEM exhibition from the University of Sheffield and had a very busy day introducing many school pupils to the principals of electrical machines and their uses. It was particularly great to see our PhD students, Choong, Reece, Alex and Dan interacting with the young people as there have been so few opportunities for this type of engagement since they started on their FEMM Hub projects.
During the day, they demonstrated and help build over 90 simple DC motors that the pupils could take away and continue to experiment with at home. These simple motor kits demonstrated the rotating switch principal first identified by William Sturgeon in 1832, and which is still commonly used in battery powered equipment today.
Feedback from the pupils and their teachers on the day was great. They enjoyed taking part in the hands-on activity and engaged in conversations on how the subjects they enjoyed at school could lead to a career in engineering and future manufacturing. Teachers were also given the opportunity to enter their schools into a draw to win them the chance to have an on-site workshop delivered by the FEMM Hub team.
Our PhD students are also working on a new interactive and fun activity that they have designed using motion sensing technology. This new game will hopefully be ready later in the year, so if you know of an outreach event, school or college, that would like to learn more about the future of electrical machine manufacturing please get in touch femmhub@sheffield.ac.uk.