Doing the unit myself was the first step

Alison Trueman works at primary school in the north west of England. She had very little experience of technical designing and making as she explains.

"I was okay with all the girlie stuff - jam tarts and sewing. I could do that without any problems but electric motors, and batteries. I'd no experience at all. So I did the unit myself. I took all the bits and pieces with me to the pub where my boyfriend and our friends all joined in.

This gave me the confidence to tackle the unit with my class and I did the unit for the first time last year. I made loads of mistakes first time round and one thing I know I'll never do again is to buy wheels with no holes in. It took the children ages to drill the holes and not many of them were at the centre!

Second time round went much better. So much better that many of the children were able to think about adding extra features - lights and buzzers. This proved a real challenge - how to get the motor and these other things working from one battery.

In the end we used two batteries which made the buggies a bit on the heavy side so they moved quite slowly. For the races we stripped off the extra features. I think I've worked out how to do it with one battery now and I'll introduce this next time. Actually I fancy getting the brighter kids to develop hand held control units which hold the battery and all the switches - nothing girlie about that eh?"

Click on thumbnails below to see examples.