Back in September, we volunteered through our position as STEM Ambassadors to take part in the STEM Pen Friends Project. The project’s creation aimed to give children the opportunity to develop their literacy skills as well as gain more of an understanding as to what working in STEM may entail.

We were partnered with The Boyle & Petyt school – just down the road in Beamsley – and sent them a PowerPoint presentation all about JB Springs and the work we do here. The class composed a lovely letter full of questions, which David and Emma from the JB Springs team read through and wrote a reply to – providing all the answers! We received some fantastic questions, such as:

• How many springs does your company make each day? (If you’re wondering, it’s around 20,000!)
• What is the most interesting product which uses your springs? (We told them there are lots of interesting products we supply springs for – like farm machinery and medical equipment. One which was particularly interesting was a very long spring which we produced to be displayed in a museum in the UAE to demonstrate how sound waves work – it was to be gold plated!)

Following this, we arranged an in-person question-and-answer session – in which David and Emma visited the school to meet the pupils and answer more of their questions. We taught them about how springs and forces work – relating them to real-world applications (such as the springs in their pens), and took with us some of our bigger springs, which they found very impressive, to show what a variation in size there can be.

We also conducted an experiment to demonstrate Hooke’s Law by firing a chocolate Santa across the classroom! As the children did this, they discovered that the further the spring deflected, the further Santa travelled.

We thoroughly enjoyed meeting the children and giving them an insight into the world of springs and they seemed to enjoy it just as much!