Top awards for QE engineers’ hi-tech projects at national ceremony
Two Sixth Form teams of QE engineers won prizes at a national awards ceremony in London after spending nine months developing innovative projects for the construction industry.
Team Overbury took the Innovation Award and Team Morgan Lovell the Business Pitch Award at the Engineering Development Trust’s (EDT) Industrial Cadets Gold Project Celebration and Award Ceremony at University College London.
The pupils, who have now entered Year 13, worked on their projects as part of the Engineering Education Scheme, sponsored by EDT, which included a two-day residential workshop at Cambridge University’s Dyson Centre for Industrial Design.
Technology teacher Tony Green said: “I am immensely proud of our QE engineers. Their awards recognise a great deal of hard work and perseverance, as well as the fruits of the mentorship they enjoyed with industry experts.”
Mr Green thanked QE’s industry sponsor for the projects, Mr Alex Wood, Health, Safety and Wellbeing Manager for Morgan Lovell, who are specialists in the design and construction of commercial buildings. Mr Wood also represented another construction industry firm, office fit-out and refurbishment specialists, Overbury.
QE’s Team Overbury worked on the development of a wearable solution for a construction worker – an exoskeleton designed to help employees with their tasks. The team comprised Dan Ji Chan, Abhinav Sandeep & Hasnain Jiwa.
Team Morgan Lovell members – Ayush Saha, Zane Shah & Haadi Siddiqui – developed a prototype of a sound sensor potentiometer. The product was designed to help construction workers guard against the occupational hazard of excessive noise. They won their award after presenting their ideas in a Dragons’ Den-style pitch.
The awards ceremony, a premier STEM showcase, brought together pupils, teachers, and industry experts. The QE teams are pictured at the ceremony with the EDT’s CEO, Julie Feest OBE.
Team Morgan Lovell’s leader, Zane Shah, said: “One of the highlights was seeing the impressive work produced by other teams and having the opportunity to network with students and professionals. We also enjoyed meeting and speaking with UCL engineering students, sharing our project, and demonstrating the hard work that went into its development.”
The whole day was a “rewarding experience”, with their business pitch “particularly memorable”, he added.
Abhinav, Team Overbury’s leader, said: “With little prior knowledge of the construction industry, building our modular exoskeleton Tenacis over three physical iterations was a significant step up from anything we’d done previously. It was a great honour to win the Innovation award, which recognised the unique cam-and-pulley mechanisms Tenacis has, differentiating itself from the market. Winning the award at UCL only made the experience more memorable.”