Marine Engineering

Back to Latest News


On Tuesday 28th November, a member of the Sea Cadets held two Marine Engineering Pathway (MEP) workshops for Year 9 students to inspire and engage them in thinking about a future in marine engineering.  The workshops are part of a major three-year project run jointly by Seafarers UK and the Sea Cadets.  These organisations are passionate about inspiring young people to engage with STEM subjects and highlighting the career opportunities in Marine Engineering. These specially created workshop sessions focussed upon some of the scientific principles behind buoyancy and displacement. The workshop linked to the KS3 Science and PSHE curricula.

The fun, hands-on sessions taught students about the principles of engineering through the use of marine based real-life scenarios. Students learnt about the science underlying the buoyancy of a ship, and were then set a tricky challenge of designing and building a "ship" in 15 minutes using the principles they had just been taught. They were given limited materials and stringent size criteria, and their ships had to hold as much cargo (marbles) as possible. The competition was fierce and many of our ships held over 100 marbles!

Both sets of students really enjoyed meeting Dan from The Sea Cadets, who is a "real" marine engineer. They also had fun completing the challenge.  Many stated they would now seriously consider looking at such a career, and would look into joining the Sea Cadets Organisation and all it has to offer.