My children went to a high school in France which is ranked in the national top 3 (the ranking fluctuates between these schools depending on the year and the detailed calculation).
There have never even been a project that was in any way close to the one your children did. Was that a "normal" project, ore one you work on by choice over a few years? Or one you do as part of a club (but holy shit - what club that must be!)
For one our education is way, way too theoretical (and basically useless once you learn ans pass the test) and then when I look at the "projects" they did, they look like kindergarten 2nd year marvels.
Hats off to your children!
EDIT: you should publish this in some competition for children
This project was definitely at the ambitious end of the spectrum for an end-of-year project, but some of the other kids did cool things too. One group built a railgun! The short timescale made everything harder - I ended up paying for rushed delivery of components from the US for example. But they did get the first Muon detector working in two weeks.
It wasn't the only project he did at school. When he was 14 or 15, they competed to build a solar still for water desalination - his included a solar panel driving a small pump to recirculate water to increase evaporation, an ultrasonic humidifier and a peltier cooler to improve condensation. It actually worked pretty well, but they didn't win. I think the judges thought they had too much parental involvement, but they didn't really.
Then when he was 16, with a different group, they entered a BP-sponsored competition with the brief "imagine the petrol station of the future". They didn't like the brief, and built a "self driving car" (basically a robot car that could follow a wall, based on a Bigtrak toy), and designed, built and tested an inductive charging system for it that could detect the car driving over coils embedded in the road, and turn on the coils in sequence as the robot drove past. I advised them on the robot software, but they did the rest. The analog electronics of coupled coils turned out to be hard, but they got it tuned in the end. It couldn't quite supply enough power to keep the car driving indefinitely, but did extend the range somewhat. That took them a bit more time, but they did win the national competition with that and got to present the project to the CEO of BP. A few weeks later BP announced a project on wireless charging for vehicles - maybe coincidence, but who knows?
It's easy to underestimate what young people are capable of, given all the information available online today.
My children went to a high school in France which is ranked in the national top 3 (the ranking fluctuates between these schools depending on the year and the detailed calculation).
There have never even been a project that was in any way close to the one your children did. Was that a "normal" project, ore one you work on by choice over a few years? Or one you do as part of a club (but holy shit - what club that must be!)
For one our education is way, way too theoretical (and basically useless once you learn ans pass the test) and then when I look at the "projects" they did, they look like kindergarten 2nd year marvels.
Hats off to your children!
EDIT: you should publish this in some competition for children