Bede’s once again hosted a Regional round of the UK Space Design Competition. It was a relatively small affair this year, with students from Sevenoaks, Riddlesdown Collegiate, Shoreham Academy and Hove Park arriving at 8am to assemble for breakfast and a series of welcome and technical briefings, before trooping down to the Maths block to begin work.
For anyone new to the UKSDC, the concept behind the competition is that students from any given school are grouped into larger teams and then given an impossible brief, known as the Request for Proposal, (RFP), set in the future and given insufficient information and nothing like the time needed to produce a presentation with a too-small number of slides and an impossibly small amount of time in which to present it! Oh, and teachers are not permitted to help!
Bede’s were partnered with the students from Shoreham Academy and three students from Hove Park in Earhart Advanced Industries (EAI), with Riddlesdown and Sevenoaks making up the team of Da Vinci Mechanica. Shoreham and Hove Park were new to the UKSDC and so it was probably natural that Bede’s students were appointed to many of the leadership positions within the team, with Oliver Hayes-Bradley as president. Oliver, like Ellie Abel, are veterans of the competition, having been involved since the U5 in Ollie’s case and the L5 for Ellie. Having both new and experienced students involved in the competition is an important reason for the continued success and involvement in the UKSDC, since that helps train the next generation of students coming through.
The teams were asked to design a space settlement in orbit around the planet Mercury in 2058 and, like all UKSDC RFPs, it was extremely demanding and completely impossible to meet every point within the time the teams have. The teams were required to design a structure for up to 800 permanent staff and 200 transient visitors, specifying in detail how they were to keep the residents safe from the intense solar radiation and operate as a solar observatory and cargo trans-shipping hub for mining operations on the planet. The presentation is essentially a sales pitch to the fictional Foundation Society for the business of building the settlement and one of the main points the judges likes about the EAI proposal was that they explored potential commercial activities for the settlement more thoroughly than most teams usually consider. Given that the cost for most settlements is usually in the order of several hundreds of billions of dollars, this was a significant plus point for EAI.
Whether it was that or the thorough answers that the team were able to provide the judges in the Q&A, EAI were announced as winners and Bede’s, Shoreham Academy and Hove Park progress to the UK final at Imperial College, London in March.
This is what two of our students who competed in the UKSDC for the first time said about their experience in the competition.
“When I first signed up for this competition, I had absolutely no idea what to expect, however, after competing in the UKSDC, I honestly couldn’t recommend it more. A common misconception is that in order to succeed you have to be unbelievable at Maths or Physics, but this competition is so much more than that. It is a chance for you to develop amazing skills such as leadership, time management and public speaking, that will benefit you for the rest of your life. As well as giving you the opportunity to have a great time with some amazing people. So if you weren’t able to participate this year, I honestly recommend you give it a go next year, as it honestly is so much fun!”
“I absolutely loved the UKSDC day, it was filled with fun, teamwork and of course lots of hard work! It was more creative than I expected and more relaxed, it was a very fun day.”
Next year’s Regional round will be held at Bede’s on Saturday 18 November 2023.
