Faye Week 3

Day 11: Macaw Engineering

The start of my final week began with spending my entire morning trying to paint the face of my doll; I removed the old paint with nail varnish remover and tried to paint her on a new set of eyes and lips with acrylic paint. However, it took me several attempts to just get the outline right and a number of times of taking off the paint with more nail polish remover and repainting as I just couldn’t seem to get it right. Finally after two and a half hours I had successfully painted on her face and only had to then sew a new top. In the afternoon I was, thankfully, not working on my doll but at Makaw engineering. There we were told about the company and their new investment, drones. We were given the opportunity to have a little paly with the smaller drones and watch someone, much more highly trained, drive one of the larger ones. They all were surprisingly loud and sounded like a pack of angry wasps. To finish off we were given a talk by one of the founders of the company, where he told us much about his own experiences from doing Physics at university.

Day 12: Kromek

First thing in the morning of Tuesday we went to a company in Durham, Kromek. After talking to a nuclear physicist there we found the Kromek didn’t just focus on Nuclear power but also on security in airports and medical machines, like PET scans. We were given a tour of the labs there and given a task to look for radiation that was given off by salt and try to then work out what elements were in the salt because of the wavelengths of the gamma rays given off. We eventually found that it was KCl (Potassium Chloride). In the afternoon we were back at the Uni and were allowed to have a go at programming a Arduino to work a motor that we could use to attach either a musical instrument to or something that would play against an instrument, it was a lot harder than it sounds. For me the hardest part was getting enough movement for it to make a sound and to keep it balanced on the motor so it would continue to move without me holding it in place.

Day 13-15: Think Physics Lab

For the final three days we were tying up loosed ends on our projects, finishing off posters, reports, our dolls and trying to actually work our instruments! On our last day on the Friday we invited in our parents to come in for 2pm so we could show them all we had done over the three weeks.

My whole experience over the past three weeks has been amazing and I would definitely recommend it to others! It was unique and even though we did a lot over the three weeks it didn’t feel like work at all, despite having to get up early every morning.