Year 7 have just completed their WHS Young Enterprise activity, a leadership opportunity that involves working in teams to create an invention that would benefit someone in the community.
Once the Year 7s had their ideas mapped out, they worked on the pitch. The only small snag was they had to train a small group of Year 2 pupils to do the pitch for them! When the year groups got together for the first time, the Year 7s were brilliantly animated and there were a lot of giggles from Year 2 pupils as the scripts and acting ideas were shared and the pitches started to take shape.
“Teaching is so hard! I don’t know how our teachers do it!” exclaimed one Year 7! However, Year 7 were working very well with their young helpers. Our teachers observed wonderfully empathetic Year 7s breaking down the task into manageable chunks and providing plenty of support for our courageous and open-minded Year 2 children.
The following week, down in the Pre-Prep, the pitches were performed. Year 2, along with the help of Year 7s, demonstrated some innovative and intriguing contraptions to revolutionise Chichester, including:
- A bright system of barriers made from fluorescent swimming noodles to make the intimidating Fishbourne Roundabout, notorious for poorly marked lanes and confused drivers, a lot safer. The system would only allow ten vehicles through the Noddle Barriers onto the roundabout at a time to make drivers more confident at circumnavigating this beast of a roundabout!
- An A&E entertainment room for bored and stressed patients waiting for four or more hours in a waiting room at St Richards. The hospital, instead of having staff continuously having to endure being pestered and questioned by anxious, panicked and frustrated patients, would instead hire this A&E Entertainment Firm to make their patients cry with laughter instead of pain as stand-up comedians, jugglers, clowns and street magicians cheer up the injured guests. The four hour wait will fly past whilst staff can get on with their job.
The winning idea was a lithium-battery powered robotic collection of trout that look like real fish but are dispatched into the Chichester estuary programmed to detect, eat and digest miniature plastics, coffee lids and netting that endanger aquatic wildlife. These fish would appear very real but would discretely be incinerating the litter that is ruining our waterways.
Congratulations to all of the Year 7s and Year 2s for their super efforts!
Mr Cousens, who ran the activity, said: “It was great to see the Year 7s’ leadership skills put to the test when they had the chance to work with Year 2. The Year 7 pupils had to be agile, thinking quickly on their feet to find strategies and tactics to deliver their vision to the young pupils. I was thrilled to witness great maturity from the older children as they often had to adapt and be flexible to accommodate and work with the requests and super ideas from their younger counterparts.”
