Skip to content ↓

Engineers ...who knew there were so many types?

On Wednesday 4th of October 2017 a group of children were chosen to go on the single greatest trip in the history of Gosforth East Middle school, (in my opinion anyway!). For this trip the children travelled in an awesome minibus (shame we couldn’t travel in the bus lanes) driven by Mr Dowman to the Stadium of Light in Sunderland.

On Wednesday 4th of October 2017 a group of children were chosen to go on the single greatest trip in the history of Gosforth East Middle school, (in my opinion anyway!). For this trip the children travelled in an awesome minibus (shame we couldn’t travel in the bus lanes) driven by Mr Dowman to the Stadium of Light in Sunderland.

When they got there the children were greeted by a massive football stadium and  were led to a tent filled with two other schools. Then they were all given different coloured fibre wristbands, Gosforth East got the blue ones, and rather speedily sent into the stadium.

The first room  was filled with a bunch of the most marvellous computer geeks, myself being one of them! Two of these experts were representatives from Ubisoft the minds behind games like For Honor and Rayman and I thought it was interesting to hear their point of view on coding and games. I then learned that this type of work is called being a digital engineer, I know what I want to be!

Next the children were led to the structural engineers, these are the people who designed the building that you are standing in… if you are standing in a building of course. They design bridges and skyscrapers and they let us try with some plastic beams. Safe to say it’s harder than it looks! They even used these beams and some wood to build a fairly big bridge that we could walk across.

After this they had lunch… IN THE STADIUM’S TOP ROW OF CHAIRS! It was cold and really high up but, through the silence of the empty stadium, they could swear that they heard fans cheering.

After lunch, the children were led to the civil engineers who gave out pens, screwdrivers, pencils and sweets. They were also offered the opportunity to weld (which was really loud and bright) and if you were too scared you could put on a pair of VR headsets and do it virtually. They were also given the opportunity to drive a tractor and dig a hole in the sand.

The final set of engineers were the chemical engineers who let you do loads of experiments with creams, dirty water and electricity (I ran 4 lights and two fans!)

Safe to say it was sad to leave and I am happy I ripped my pocket filling it with enough leaflets to remember them for 100 years or more! (My mum wasn’t!)  

Garon 8KJ