News
Monday, 21 June 2010
MINI Engineers Challenge Local School Children to Think Green
This month sees the spectacular culmination of innovative arts and science project, The CIAO! Ark. The project, which initially began in January, has been designed to get school children from across Oxfordshire thinking about the positive benefits of a low carbon future.
One of the Ark’s keenest supporters throughout this process has been Cowley based car manufacturer, MINI Plant Oxford. Plant Oxford’s involvement with the Ark project not only builds upon its long-held interest in environmental sustainability, but also continues a pattern of active community involvement that it has successfully developed over recent years.
Hundreds of primary school children first became fascinated by the MINI Plant when they learned about the development of its 100% electric, zero-emissions ‘MINI E’ at the Children’s Climate Change Conference earlier this year.
Since the Conference, the Plant has continued to play an active role in the run up to the final five day festival by providing hands on support and sending its own engineers to run workshops within participating primary schools.
During these school workshops – which have been designed to encourage children to think about and explore the future of transport – Plant engineers set the children a special challenge: to see how far they could propel a scale model of the MINI along the floor using nothing but sustainable energy.
The children were then invited to sit down with the visiting engineers and brainstorm possible ways of doing this, drawing on the team’s knowledge of sustainable power – developed through their own experiments with hydrogen and electric cars – to come up with a solution to the proposed challenge.
This week, the children went to Plant Oxford with their creations to see which school would win the MINI challenge. And it was Unicorn School from Abingdon who won having achieved a distance of 17 metres by giving their car a huge push.
For more information about the CIAO! Ark, please visit the website.
