The daunting task of lecturing to 14- to 16-year olds on the mechanics of building and operating people-carrying drones. The county of Lancashire is the place to do it, the first of Britain's canals (the Bridgewater) and passenger railways (Liverpool-Manchester) having been built right here, and Marx's Das Capital having been based on the fledgling Industrial Revolution that was begun in the cotton mills of Manchester. The county was also home until recently to the greatest concentration of aircraft parts manufacturers in the country.
That however is the stuff of stuffy history books and of little or no interest to school-kids brought up on a diet of social media. Sustaining the concentration for an hour was thus the key, and I give myself a C+ for doing so, or at least for brief periods. And when I asked who saw themselves going onto building eVTOLs as a career, no hands was raised. Smart kids!
Nonetheless the lady heading up the science department suggested there were four or five students in particular who'd be very keen to get involved. Free programmers! We'll see how it goes, but I like the idea of putting a basic design together that I can build for schools as well as for the likes of industry. And I would call it the "Scarisbrick Hall-icopter".
If the place looks familiar incidentally ~ and not just from the Harry Potter movies ~ it will be because there has been an estate here since the Norman invasion of 1066, when French knights were rewarded with tracts of land. There's a thousand-year history behind the name therefore, and the reason that it might look familiar is that the UK's Houses of Parliament were designed in the same Gothic style by the same architect in the form of Pugin... and in fact the tower on this pile was apparently a dry-run for the one in the capitol.
Dropping my son off to school there on a misty morning with its gargoyled towers echoing to the caws of crows will forever live in my memory ~ everyone's idea of how every English school should look. What goes on inside is equally remarkable too. The latest data suggests that among sixth-form (final year) colleges in the UK, it figures among the top ten.
It is STEM week in the UK though, and getting young heads and hands involved is what it has been all about. I would have like for them to have seen my son flying around the MUGA pitch on in the vehicle, but that's something for another day.
