Students were tasked with designing, building and racing vehicles powered by potential energy at the launch of this year’s Mid Sussex STEM Challenge. The launch event took place at the Council Chamber of Mid Sussex District Council in Haywards Heath on Friday, October 24 (1.30pm). The 2025-2026 ‘Potential Pit Stop Challenge’ will see students given a chassis so they can create a potential energy powered vehicle, which can race on a predetermined course and load a selection of weights in ‘a pit stop zone’.
00:00My name is Jim Davis and I represent engineering and manufacturing businesses in England and Wales.
00:06I started off my career as an engineer, a production engineer, then got into engineering management, operations management, and now do what I do today.
00:17When I was your age I probably had no idea that one day I'd be doing this, but I'm so, so pleased and privileged to be joining you today.
00:26These projects are a fantastic opportunity for you to learn some real fundamental skills that will be really, really valuable for you and prospective employers and companies that you work for in the future.
00:40You'll have some fun, I think, and actually I'm really, really looking forward to next July or June when the finals take place and we see the outputs of your labour and hard work.
00:54My name is JP, I'm a Quality Assurance and Production Engineer for FlowServe and have been for a few years now.
01:01This is my fourth challenge now, actually, I sort of joined halfway through the first one.
01:05I think this one, like Nick mentioned, is a little bit different in some ways where we have sort of taken it back a bit more to sort of first principles
01:12and you might be able to apply a bit more of the knowledge that you might have learned in school into something that might come into a sort of really good outcome.
01:20So, everyone's going to receive something similar to a basic sort of chassis kit here that you can see, which sort of gets everyone on the same starting point.
01:29We're going to then ask you to power this using purely potential energy.
01:34So, that could be something like gravitational potential energy.
01:38You might have seen some of those gravity-powered cars where you might suspend a mass which propels it along.
01:45You might want to use some sort of stored pressure or you might want to use some sort of magnetic potential energy.
01:51These are all the types of energies that we're looking for.
01:54And just kind of to put some sort of ground rules in terms of what we're looking for,
01:59we're looking for the vehicle to move without you touching it.
02:03So, that could be that you might take a break and you might refuel it or you might, you know, re-pressurise it or rewind the gears and things that you use.
02:13But the idea is that you'll be moving this from point A to point B without touching it while it's moving.
02:20You will then load it with a mass, which is, I think, yet to be decided.
02:25And sort of the format of the actual track itself is still to come.
02:28But you'll load it with a mass and then you'll bring it back and you'll just see how many laps you can do in sort of a given time.
02:35Now, one thing you have to know, not all crazy ideas are good ideas.
02:39So, very likely you will fail a few times on track.
02:44But that's the whole part fun of it.
02:45I could tell you some stories in my PhD where I explode in various iron-trapping chips and the microchips that we use for quantum computers.
02:53I could tell you a lot of stories and I probably shouldn't tell you some of these stories.
02:56But the point I'm trying to make is that failing also is a good thing because you try it.
03:03What is really important is persistence, persistence in going towards your goal.
03:09Even if everybody tells you you can't do that or you think, ah, you know, I'm just not really clever enough like these other people.
03:15Probably you're going to win this.
03:17Don't.
03:18Like, you should believe in yourself.
03:19You won't have doubts about yourself, but you guys can really affect and change the world.
03:25And today is the first day for you guys to do that.
03:29I'm, as you've just heard, Deputy Lieutenant for West Sussex.
03:33What that means is I'm here as a representative of King Charles III.
03:37King Charles takes a direct interest and a lifelong interest in the well-being of everybody in the country.
03:44And therefore I'm here today to congratulate you and, for that matter, everybody who's on the council, all of the teachers, all of the volunteers, all of the professors,
03:55all of the people who make STEM something that is not just an intention and an aspiration, but something that actually works for everybody who's involved.
04:05So I applaud all of you for being part of this process.
04:08And I am delighted to be able to say that, therefore, by me standing here, I will announce that this STEM project for the year ahead, the seventh STEM project,
04:21it is, therefore, now started and it is open to you as teams to then take this forward.
04:28And I wish you every success and have great fun doing it.
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