Sam Duke
The Engineering Education Scheme is an annual project run by the Engineering Development Trust. Teams of four Year 12 students are linked with local companies to work on real scientific, engineering and technological problems. Teams are paired with engineers from the company to help them throughout their project.
The team selection was competitive, with several people competing for a place in the team. Each potential member had an interview with the regional director of the scheme, and a few days later the final team was decided.
Our team of Sam Brown, Ollie Hickley, Nic McNiven-Young and Sam Duke worked with Gordon Boot from Siemens Enterprise Communications Ltd on a project involving telephone systems.
The first activity we did as a team was the induction day in October 2007 at the Catalys Conference centre in Derby. We went to a number of lectures and took part in team building activities; this allowed us to discover each others strengths and weaknesses. At the end if the day, out engineer asked us to go away and do some basic research in order to gain some background information for the project.
We met after the half term break and were introduced to the project. We were asked to design a product for analysing control signals within a digital telephone exchange. This should be cost effective, easy to use and portable. At first we were baffled by many technical phrases, such as ‘HDLC’ and ‘NAK and poll’ but after many confused discussions, we could get on with the more technical aspects of the project.
We had around 6 months to complete the project from the original introduction day to the final presentation at Henry Ford College in Loughborough so time was tight. The next event was a residential trip to Loughborough at the end of the Autumn term. We arrived with an untested circuit board, a PC, a box of phones and the server exchange after a bit of a squeeze in the truck on the journey there. The first task was to test and correct the circuit board, which meant a number of soldering burns! We then set about the task of creating a program or the project, which took up a lot of the time. Meanwhile, we designed a case for the circuit board.
We were pleased with our progress at the residential and returned to school with plenty to do. We finalised the circuit and case designs and soon had a professional looking project. We made a lot of progress on the program and created an application that an engineer could use to easily diagnose a problem.
After sixth months, the time came to show of our work at the EES Celebration day. We had to give a talk to some judges, who then later came and quizzed us about the project. We also gained our Gold Crest Awards for our individual efforts. In the end the judges gave us some feedback and were very pleased with what we had created.
One of our products was taken to be used by Siemens and the second prototype was kept by us at school. However in the week following the competition, our link engineer Gordon Boot came to collect our system as it was urgently neede by a second team to solve a problem. As a result of its success, we are building four more of these devices for the engineers at Siemens to use. All in all the team were very pleased with the outcome.
