We were recently contacted by a teacher at West Rise School to see if we could help them build a “Marsh Rover” vehicle from parts they bought with a grant from the Mars Rovers school programme.

It’s always lovely to be asked, so even though it wasn’t something we’d done before, our resident engineer thought “how hard could it be?”.

For two terms, young people from years 5 and 6 came to our base at East Sussex College to learn about electronics, controlling motors, measuring and sawing plastic pipes and making our own twisted pair wires. At the end of the project, we’d built the core of the rover. It would benefit from more work to get it running effectively.

We asked the children how they’d like to equip the Marsh Rover in future and, overwhelmingly, they said they’d like to put a camera on it so that they could capture pictures when they’re able to send it out on a trek.

So that’s next year’s club sorted, then!