The Engineering Club embarked on a five-week block in our first week back in November. Instead of our usual weekly “one-off” design, make and test sessions, we headed to the safety of the DT block to escape the “Zombie Apocalypse”

Pupils were greeted with a siren and lockdown with a brief explanation that a zombie army was about to march to feast on the brains of the educated at SJC . . . eek! 

Pupils decided on their teams and were given a set of briefs to investigate in the order of importance they felt relevant.

Silent footsteps - designing a shoe cover that allows the people of the compound to slip outside to the vegetable patch but not get detected.

Neck protection - design a neck protector that allows for safe coverage of the carotid arteries.

Siege tactics - teams had to design a trebuchet-style prototype that allowed for antivirals to be launched over the wall.

Pupils were given limited resources and challenges to hinder their productivity along the way, such as no electricity or power shortage periods, resources being put into quarantine and even members of the teams being contaminated and having to work separately on a prosthetic arm.

Teams worked diligently on both a blueprint and a prototype for their products, creating some ingenious solutions to be tested.

Testing was rather eventful with prototypes being tested to destruction in some cases!

Unfortunately, there had been some devious tactics put in place by Adhavan and Noah, our 6th form helpers. Unbeknownst to the teams, a few of their members had been approached to work for the zombie army for free resources. Two pupils took up the challenge and had great fun working with unlimited materials and inside information.

As we started to pack up after testing, this information was disseminated and pupils asked, Traitors-style, to write the names of the team who they thought were the “zomblings”. 

The deal being that if guessed correctly, each team would win a prize, but if the guesses were wrong, the zombies would take all the prizes.

Just in case you were wondering . .  The zombies took all!