Inaugural KMF Young Engineer of the Year Award inspires

When managing director Gareth Higgins and his team at KMF (Precision Sheet Metal) instigated the Young Engineer of the Year Award, they had little idea how popular it would be. The challenge sent out to local schoolchildren was to design a clock. KMF would supply the mechanism and provide some classroom support, but the concept had to be the children's own work. "At one stage, I could barely get into my office, due to the number of mechanisms," says Mr Higgins. "We had 18 schools take up the project, with over 1,700 mechanisms being distributed. The design brief gave the children pretty much free range to come up with a design, with only a few constraints, including the consideration of the commercial viability of the finished product, and an incentive was that the finalists would have their designs put on sale in a local clock shop." Those 1,700 mechanisms created a massive task for the team of judges, who had a difficult job reducing them to a shortlist of 100, and an even more arduous task picking the 14 finalists. The finalists, along with parents, teachers and a wide range of customers and suppliers to KMF, attended the prize-giving ceremony at Stoke City's Britannia Stadium, where the awards were presented by the Gadget Show's Jason Bradbury. The 10 runners up each received an iPod with the two winners receiving an iPad and other prizes from the TV presenter. Ben Walker of Ormiston Horizon Academy, the winner in the under-14 category, is a self-confessed 'techno geek' and was the only student to design a fully functioning 24 hour clock. His design was put on a 'soak' test over the Christmas holidays and, as he fully expected, it worked perfectly well. He used CAD skills to create the design and the project provided new challenges that he could apply his knowledge to. In the under-16 group, Cameron Forrest (pictured) of Madeley High School, was inspired in his design by his love of music, both playing and listening. It was while doing the latter that his 'Eureka moment' came to him, as he sat at home listening to music through his Beats headphones. Two additional prizes were awarded for packaging design, which was part of the overall brief of the project. In the under 14 group, this went to Regan Latham, who drew on her love of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster for inspiration. In the under-16 group, it was another music-inspired submission, with James Heath creating a mini Marshall Amplifier design to house his guitar shaped clock. Both packages were professionally manufactured for display on the evening by KMF's packaging supplier Advanced Packaging, who helped to judge the even,t along with Greenway Pepper, HSBC Bank, and the National Apprentice Service. Says Gareth Higgins: "Technology will undoubtedly play a major part in the future of precision sheet metal manufacturing, robots, computers, materials and lots more will be vital elements, not only of our industry, but many others, that is why we created the KMF Young Engineer of the Year Award. "By doing this and expanding it further geographically in future, we aim to encourage more school children to take an active interest in how things are manufactured. Hopefully, the enthusiasm that we have seen in this first year of competition will be infectious and next year there will be a much more difficult task for our panel of judges."