Terrific and Tremendous Trebuchet shenanigans

Reading week 2022 saw the Product Design students taking on a challenge of medieval proportions! Designing and building Trebuchets.

The students had cardboard, duct tape and a broom handle to create their structure. All teams had a 5Kg weight at their disposal to generate power.

Reading week 2022 for the Product Design Students

The weeklong activity is a non-assessed activity designed to encourage collaboration, problem solving and more importantly social interaction between all three years of our course as well as the master’s students on the Applied Innovation Design course.

Setting up the targets

Peredur Williams (academic lead for Product Design) said

09:00 Monday (no lie-ins here!) saw the brief being shared. To design and build a structure capable of firing a juggling ball in three specific competitions. The first challenge was who could fire the juggling ball the furthest. The second was a speed challenge – how many juggling balls could be fired within a minute, and finally it was the precision challenge – could they hit a (very slow) moving target.

Testing the finished products

The climax happened on Friday on the all-weather pitch at Ffriddoedd (thank you to Brailsford centre for its use) where the testing and firing of juggling balls happened.

Peredur finished by saying

To be honest, I have no recollection who won which competition and who came out on top, but the winning was not the important element. We retired to Bar Uni to bring the Reading Week activity to a close.