ElevationX Ltd Workshop

A number of our workshops are based around the computing aspect of STEM, with a heavy leaning towards coding and robots.

For older or more able students, our Robot Quest workshop demonstrates how robotics can be used in real life situations, by tasking students with piloting and coding Sphero robots to rescue a casualty from a makeshift disaster zone. The workshop features soft skills such as problem solving and teamwork - it also gets very competitive!

For younger groups, our Busy Bots workshop tasks young people with completing a series of curriculum linked challenges and tasks using Blue-Bot robots. This not only involves them using their coding skills, but also encourages teamwork, communication, problem solving and listening!

In all our workshops, we link back to real world careers and explore how young people can use the topics and skills from the classroom in their future jobs and careers.

All workshops include links to the skills builder framework, and specific workshops (such as our Skills Building workshop) use a series of fun challenges and games to focus on these, demonstrating the huge variety and crucial importance of soft skills in the workplace. Particularly focusing on soft skills such as communication, teamwork and logic, each game will demonstrate to the young people how important these skills are in future learning and employment opportunities.

We use our big kit of four types of sports equipment to highlight physics in sport. A batak board, a giant goal, rowing machines and sprint gates. Students rotate between the 4 pieces to answer a series of science questions.

We have many different workshops that either link directly to physics or which embed physics knowledge into an alternative task.

For example, during our Power to Drive workshop, miniature electric cars are built to demonstrate some of the principles of gears, before the young people then use the cars to understand the relationship between voltage input and distance travelled. They then use this knowledge to perform a series of tests to draw up a graph, and a line of best fit if applicable, with the intention of getting their team's car to stop closest to a specified distance.

In Sounds like Science, we look at the science of sound, specially crafted for students in Years 3 and 4. This interactive and immersive experience combines the excitement of experimentation with the joy of music-making, all while aligning with key learning objectives in the Year 4 curriculum. The heart of the workshop lies in hands-on exploration as students delve into a series of captivating experiments with boomwhackers, uncovering the fundamental principles behind sound production, delving into concepts such as vibrations, volume, and pitch.

During our What's a Watt workshop, the terms power, watts, energy, joules and calories are explored and put into context using rowing machines to demonstrate the differences and contextualise how much this really is. Young people are then challenged to work in a team to row as far as possible, generating as much electrical energy as possible. This is then given to the young people in the form of food, so that they can visualise the link between work done and calories.

Our physical geography workshops are among our most popular, being suitable for a wide range of age groups and building in a range or other underlying knowledge to reinforce the classroom learning.

Our hands-on Tower Tussle workshop guides learners through the different requirements of building design, and how buildings can be adapted to different environments. Students are introduced to the concept of earthquake-proof buildings, before being challenged to build either an earthquake or hurricane resistant tower. A budget is given, with each material having a different price, so teams of young people must use their funds carefully to build the tallest tower possible, which is then tested with a fan (hurricane) or vibration plate (earthquake) to see whether it can withstand the environment.

During our Robot Quest workshop, young people are introduced to modern uses of robotics and how robots can be used to help in natural disasters. They are then tasked with using a Sphero robot to rescue a person who has been injured in an earthquake disaster zone. They must code their Sphero to avoid the obstacles and navigate to the casualty, before sounding the alarm and rushing back to alert rescuers.