Woodham School students who participated in the annual Future Business Magnate (FBM) competition have been informed their prototype design is to be one of only two chosen from across County Durham to be brought to the market. The delighted Y8 students – who have spent the best part of a school year on the project, were short listed for a number of FBM awards, but walked away with the Brian Manning Award for the most effective networking – for their work with Darlington based Social Enterprise Bikestop.
The team – who go by the company name Freewheeling, decided to design bespoke wheelchair accessories for that 2% of the population who have to use a wheelchair to get out and about. Concerned that their innovations could benefit corporations more than their target customers, the youngsters opted to become a not-for-profit organisation. This, they say, will allow them to earn a wage for themselves, whilst ploughing any profits back into to building the business, and providing for the community they come from.
Having taken their school’s wheelchair out for a test drive, the young entrepreneurs identified a number of issues with it … and decided to do something about them. According to team member, Ciara Montgomery, wheelchairs can be uncomfortable, difficult to manoeuvre and difficult to stop; so Freewheeling set out to make them more fit for purpose: “Although wheelchairs have been around for a long time, the design has hardly changed at all,” she says. “Having looked at a basic wheelchair, and studied the regulations which govern their manufacture, we came to the conclusion we could improve them for very little cost – in fact – thanks to our partnership with Bikestop, we could do this using some recycled bike parts – which is good for the user, and for the environment too.”
The ingenious adaptations are currently a closely guarded secret, but thanks to those clever boffins at Woodham Academy and their new partners at County Durham Engineering and Manufacturing Network (CDEMN), readers could soon be finding out for themselves what all the fuss is about.
