London School children Engineer Success

On 3 May children from fifteen London primary schools, including Tower Bridge Primary School and Surrey Square Primary School both from Southwark, headed to the Royal Albert Hall to present design and engineering ideas to a panel of experts from Rolls-Royce, Cirque du Soleil, the City of Westminster and the Hall’s Learning and Participation Department. The presentation day represented the final stage of Evolution, an engaging and hands-on engineering project inspired by the Cirque du Soleil show Totem which made its UK debut at the Hall earlier this year. Evolution was designed to stimulate interest in design and engineering amongst younger children through an exciting series of problem-solving activities centred on the challenges of staging a Cirque du Soleil show at the Hall.

Since January, over 500 pupils have been tackling engineering and creative challenges to research, design and build 3D set models for the show, including a huge turtle-shell structure that can be used for acrobatics, the rigging for a revolving stage and a rotating scorpion bridge. Teachers from the participating schools went to a training day with Rolls-Royce engineers and Andy Peat, the technical project manager for Cirque du Soleil, and students visited the Hall in February to experience the magic of Totem and get design ideas.

Members of the Lincolnshire Young Journalist Academy (LYJA) have been reporting on the project and will also be covering the presentation day. LYJA was established to encourage young people to engage with news and current affairs. The young journalists have been interviewing members of Cirque du Soleil, Rolls-Royce and the pupils taking part, and creating pod and webcasts. This is the first time LYJA have been involved in this project, which has brought many of its members to London for the first time.

This is the fourth year the four organisations on the judging panel have worked together. Significantly, this year will also see the production of a generic learning resource which can be used by schools without students having to see a performance, giving the project and its aims a much wider reach.