The Bloodhound Project has received a boost for its educational programme, geared to interest school children in science and maths.
The Bloodhound Project, which will see an attempt made on the world landspeed record at Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape, has received a major boost for its educational programme, geared to interest school children in science and maths. The aim of the programme, to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, has resonated strongly with software giant Oracle, which is already the digital partner to the project.
At the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco this week, Oracle president of product development Thomas Kurian announced that the Oracle Academy will join forces with Bloodhound SSC Education, a non-profit organisation established by the Bloodhound Project. The collaboration connects Oracle Academy’s computer science curriculum with the technology behind the Bloodhound supersonic car project, which aims to smash the 1,000 mph world land speed record.
Earlier this year, Oracle announced that the Bloodhound Project had selected Oracle Cloud to collect, analyze, and broadcast data from more than 500 real-time sensors installed on the Bloodhound Supersonic Car to classrooms around the world. This information gives students a detailed look at how technology is rocketing the world’s fastest land vehicle towards 1,000 mph, as well as providing Bloodhound engineers with valuable data to continually optimize the supersonic car’s performance.
At Oracle Open World, Richard Noble, director of the the Bloodhound Project, told the audience during a keynote session on Tuesday morning that the educational project had been partly motivated by the success of the Apollo manned space program in the USA in inspiring a generation of scientists.
Oracle Academy and the Bloodhound Education Programme will team up to make available two projects designed to help students build engineering knowledge, data analysis, and Java programming skills. The projects will leverage Oracle Academy’s Alice and Greenfoot workshops, introducing new content and data from the Bloodhound Project.
The Alice-based project challenges students to create an animated virtual version of the Bloodhound team’s desert camp. In the Greenfoot-based project, students learn how to adjust engineering variables of the car design and test their impact on speed. The Bloodhound-themed Oracle Academy projects will be available to classrooms and computing clubs in120 countries.
“Students still need a strong base in maths and physics, but this is a digital world and it’s equally important that they develop a taste for computer skills if they are to thrive in the modern workforce,” said Chris Fairhead, Chairman of the Bloodhound Education Programme. “Through our alliance with Oracle Academy, we have added this crucial piece of the puzzle to our education programme and are already seeing a great deal of interest from the teachers and schools we work with.”
Over the next three years, Oracle Academy will train 150 of Bloodhound’s volunteer teachers on Alice and Greenfoot, enabling them to effectively integrate these learning tools into STEM curricula and help students build coding skills. These resources and trainings will also be freely available to teachers worldwide, as part of Oracle Academy’s mission is to advance computer science education globally.
“At Oracle Academy, we are thrilled to team with the Bloodhound Education Programme and bring the excitement of the Bloodhound supersonic car to the 3.5 million students we reach yearly,” said Alison Derbenwick Miller, Oracle Academy Vice President. “We look forward to furthering our collaboration with the Bloodhound Education Programme, and advancing our commitment to prepare students for college and career-readiness in the 21st century.”
Project Bloodhound
The Bloodhound Project is an international education initiative focussed around a 1,000mph (1,609kmh) World Land Speed Record. The primary aim is to inspire the next generation of scientist and engineers by showcasing STEM subjects (science, technology engineering and mathematics) in the most exciting way possible.
At full speed, Bloodhound SSC will cover a mile (1.6km) in 3.6 seconds – that’s 4.5 football pitches laid end to end per second or 300m in the blink of an eye.
The world land speed record of 763mph (1228km/h) is held by Thrust SSC, a UK team led by Bloodhound’s Project Director Richard Noble and driven by Andy Green.
65% of students engaged by the Bloodhound Education Programme would now consider engineering or science as a vocation (sample size: 1,804).
Bloodhound’s education team have created over 1,000 pieces of free curriculum ready teaching resource.
The Model Rocket Car Challenge, supported by Guinness World Records, has seen students build model cars capable initially of speeds of 88mph, which then rose to 210mph and now 553mph (889km/h), a record held by Joseph Whitaker Young Engineers Club.
