Students from the beautifully designed UTC Swindon building (built on the old GWR works) were asked to put their own design hats on today (20 November) as Year 10 and Year 12 students went off timetable, working on a HUGE challenge – to Design a Data Centre!
The task was set by Ark Data Centres, a major employer in the digital infrastructure industry, and one of the school’s employer partners through its Digital Futures Programme.
Working in teams, the students were set a genuine problem: where to site and how to build a new data centre. Data centres are being built all over the world as our reliance on all things digital booms. The data centres (essentially massive servers that house our digital data) are needed to ensure internet-enabled devices such as phones, laptops and smart TVs can operate properly, giving residents the ability to stream TV, films and music, access social media, do their internet banking and many other things besides.
The average household is thought to need about 700GB per month – an increase of 45% in only two years – so there is a constant need to increase capacity in the UK and worldwide. Ark Data Centres, one of our Digital Futures Programme partners, is a major player in this industry and faces this issue every day.
Supported by several other employers from this industry (Virtus Data Centres, LMG and CBRE) students spent the day deciding where to site and how to design their data centres.
They used skills and knowledge from their subjects to create a proposal which was later judged by our employer partners in each classroom.
Skills from all areas of learning were called upon, as the teams needed to come up with answers to the following questions:
- Where will your data centre be located and why? Geography
- What will your building look like? How will you design it? Architecture
- What materials will you build it out of? How will it function? Engineering
- What infrastructure do you need? What hardware and software is required? Computing
- How will you run your Data Centre? What is your business proposal? Business
- How much will it cost to fund your data centre? How much power is needed? Maths
- What cooling systems can you use? How will you ensure sustainability? Science
- How will you write a winning presentation for the employers? English
The winning team from each classroom presented their idea at the end of the day to all partners.
Matt Gilbert, engineering manager at LMG said: “It’s nice to see from a wide collection of students how each team had different focuses. One of the teams had a sole eye on their cost, other teams have got sole focus on their location and why they’re picking that location. Others are looking at the inner systems, and if you pulled all of them together, you’d be making the world’s most ideal data centre.
“Days like this are fundamental to building the kids’ confidence and learning – they may have started off this morning quite closed up in their shell, and now they’re all very open and communicating between ourselves, working together.”
Lee Smith, Senior Project Manager at LMG added: “I’ve really today. When like me you’ve spent your entire life in this environment, you just know the way it’s done. Walking around here today was really nice to see other takes on the ‘way’.”
‘Can I comment on how smartly they are dressed. How you dress is how you act.’ Said CBRE’s Jack Pereira.
Commenting on the day, Lu, from all female winning team North Virginia said she didn’t know anything about data centres before, but found the challenge day really interesting. “Although you’re not doing a job, you’re doing a lot of research so it gives you an insight into what you might do working at a data centre.”
Well done to all female winning team, North Virginia, who impressed the judges with the way they organised their time, working as a team but separately. “They all knew what they were doing,” said Ark Data Centre’s Allan Bosley.
Following on, Kieran Baggs of Ark said: “Delivery of the presentation was really, really confident. And that’s probably the hardest thing to do. Part of adult life is standing up in front of a group of people, or peers you don’t really know and this team really seem to know what they were talking about. And the way they delivered it in the presentation was fantastic.”
The winning team won Amazon vouchers.
Rounding off the day, Allan presented to the students on the
“Data centres is a very exciting industry, and we [employers] are investing our time in this because it’s important. It’s important to us. I think it’s important to the world in many ways, because we use lots of power. We have to be very careful about how we operate. We’re very concerned about the environment within which we operate. We’re responsible for some the crown jewels of all of the organisations whose data we hold, so it’s something that we take very seriously. And I think you have, too, and you’ve reflected that. Well done.”
Why do we do ‘Challenge Days’?
One of the main differences of attending a UTC is the many opportunities our students have to spend time with and work on real-life projects with employers. As well as encouraging teamwork and critical thinking, these challenge days help students:
Improve work-ready skills – Helping students develop and understand the skills and attributes needed to secure a career of choice
Raise Aspirations – Working alongside current and relevant employers with real-world experience, advice and guidance
Prepare for next steps – Supporting students in making informed decisions about your next steps, whether that be education, employment or training