SwanSEDS, the Swansea University Rocketry Team, is in its 3rd year of flying and after a very successful 2024 jumped from around 20 to over 100 members at the start of the 24/25 academic year. This left the same number of experienced members to pass skills on, but a huge number of extra students looking to learn the essentials of model rocketry from them. After dozens of hours of work to plan a solution to this, the Swansea Rocketry Challenge, or SRC, was envisioned and quickly sprang to life.
The Swansea Rocketry Challenge
So what does SRC mean for students? The whole challenge has been designed from the ground up to replicate, and therefore teach essential skills required by, the landscape of national student rocketry competitions held within the UK. Students taking part are placed together in small teams, each with a more experienced lead, and together with their teammates follow a complete engineering development process for a model rocket to achieve a specific target altitude. The teams learn to combine given design restraints with the tools and processes they are taught along the way to first design, then build, and eventually launch their own model rockets. If the cool factor alone wasn't enough of a reason to push teams to do their best, there are also prizes for teams that come first place in certain categories!
SRC is a marked competition, and there will indeed be an overall winner. We had found that this drive towards victory has been one of the biggest motivators in students excelling in model rocketry in the past, and so we didn't want to pass that opportunity up here. Teams are marked on Preliminary Design Reviews, Critical Design Reviews, Flight Readiness Reviews, Launch Performance, and Post Flight Presentations. Having a large and realistic range of deliverables spread throughout the academic year allows students to remain highly engaged with SRC while also not sacrificing the time needed for their degrees!
SRC, however, is also a highly taught competition. At every stage, teams are given tutorials, lectures, and workshops on the skills and knowledge they need to excel here, and are given detailed feedback from the experienced members running the show to help keep the learning process going.
Prioritising the Individual
At first, it might not be the most intuitive thing, to put students new to the model rocketry world straight into a competition against each other. This was, perhaps, why it took us so long to come up with the idea. However, looking at the concept from the perspective of a new student entering our team really enshrines the benefits delivered by this teaching format.
In terms of numbers, there are over 50 students taking part in SRC, and only around 10 members of our team with suitable knowledge to teach model rocketry from scratch. Of these 10 members, not all may be available on any day, and not all may have the time to do this either. Taking a simple classroom format would simply not give enough time for any single student to have all questions answered. By grouping students into small teams in their learning environment, they can both bounce questions and problem-solving onto each other first, which provides a great social aspect to participants and be seen far more frequently by those teaching the sessions for the more complicated issues.
SRC also provides an insight at any time as to where a student is in their learning journey and what is to come through the challenge structure; If completing their Critical Design Review, they know that they almost have all the skills needed to start getting into the workshop, whereas turning up week by week to a seminar or lecture on the same content may leave someone new to the hobby confused as to the relevancy of what they are learning. In the same comparison with a lecture format to introduce model rocketry, SRC provides a much more fun and interactive experience than any one-way teaching could hope to, which really starts to turn our sessions into weekly highlights for our members.
The competitive aspect of SRC rounds out the benefits of this teaching format. Teams competing against each other throughout the challenge for the various prizes available such as 'Most Accurate Apogee' or 'Best Data Presentation' can be the drive that pushes a lot of students to move from just getting along contently to doing their absolute best. The aforementioned social aspect too within teams is further enhanced by the competitiveness, only a few months into running SRC and we're already seeing dozens of friendships emerging within the teams, a benefit you couldn't put a value to.
Making Learning Practical
The benefits of students learning essential new skills for model rocketry in teams has been discussed from their perspective - but there are also practical benefits on the management side to this format. Rocketry is expensive, and budgets are always limited, so we simply wouldn't be able to fund a rocket of the scale being designed for SRC for each member taking part alone - the challenge being completed by teams instead of individuals massively increases the cool-factor of what we can achieve here.
The team-based learning format also lowers the pressure on any one member - while alone missing one session or having one very time-consuming assignment could stop someone from having the ability to take part in the fun of model rocketry, as part of a team there is always someone to help you out when you need it. This allows us to hugely increase the number of members who do get to see their efforts get all the way through the rewarding launch day, which is what it is all about when teaching the skills of model rocketry.
Additionally, from the perspective of the whole team, managing to teach all of these skills at the same time as introducing our members to the various requirements and complexities of rocketry competitions will inevitably give an edge when selecting competition teams in future years. Whereas previously half a team would have taken place in some student competition before if lucky, we're hoping to go in with full rosters of members knowledgable in how to take home trophies.
Our Progress
At the time of writing, we've successfully had 8 teams taking part in SRC deliver Preliminary Design Reviews to the teaching members and provided detailed feedback to allow designs to be refined towards their final sign-offs before building begins. Participating members have given really positive feedback about SRC and everything we hoped it would offer seems to be coming true, showing the the benefits of providing teaching for skills such as model rocketry in group-based competitive settings are out there for your teams to make use of too!
SRC was made possible with the help of RS and the Swansea Employability Academy, without their support we'd have struggled to provide as many teams as we have taking part with a suitable budget for the levels of creativity that we'd love to see. Rocket motors for our teams have been secured and we're aiming to see 8 rockets flying high in the early Summer of 2025!
Comments