Team Marl1n Blog

  KeyShot is one of our amazing atlantic sponsors! They kindly gave us a free education license to their amazing rendering software. Their software is really easy to use, and gives a professional render. You can check out their software at www.keyshot.com.  If you want to learn how to use KeyShot, check out our newly released video at www.youtube.com/@teammarl1n. Episode 3 of our design files takes you through the basics of KeyShot and how to easily create a simple render using their drag and drop software. You can check out our other design files for information on the deign process of the competition!

On the 2nd March, we competed in the North London 2023 Pro Class Regional Finals. We placed 3rd, allowing us to progress to the National Finals! We also won the Pit Display Award! We would like to thank our amazing sponsors for their help in the competition. SimScale have kindly given us a free academic license to their amazing software, for online and professional CFD simulations. Visit them at www.simscale.com . KeyShot have kindly given us a free education license to their excellent app, for professional and easy to use renderings. Visit them at www.keyshot.com . Hayes Paper Co. kindly gave us decal paper to decorate our car with. Pravins kindly gave us money to fund our journey. NotPla kindly supplied us with eco-friendly paper for our pit display. We would also like to thank Merchandise.co.uk and Veritas. Keep your eyes on our blog and youtube channel for more updates!

Next Thursday (2nd March) are the London North Regional Finals where we will be competing as a Pro Class team. We are really excited to compete and race our car, but we still have lots to do. Time Management is very important in the competition, and something we have always struggled with. We have always had a massive rush a month before the competition day to finish all of our portfolios, the pit display, the presentation and the car.  So far, we have completed our Enterprise Portfolio and done 75% of our DnE Portfolio. We have also manufactured our car and wheels, but we still need to assemble them. We also need to finish the graphics for our pit display and presentation.  We are also super excited to announce a new sponsor! Merchandise.co.uk are our new sword sponsor. They have given us 5% off their custom hoodies, which has allowed us to create our team uniform for the competition day!

We are proud to announce a new sponsor!  We have partnered with NotPla, who have kindly provided us with 25% off their amazing NotPla paper! This paper is sustainable and good-looking, and we're using it for our portfolios and pit display. You can visit their website at notpla.com . As part of the competition, we wanted to be a sustainable and eco-friendly team. NotPla has kindly given us the means to print our portfolios and Pit Display information onto eco-friendyl paper made out of waste seaweed!  We have also set up an account with the abor day foundation to plant 50 trees in support of the planet. You can donate at trees.teammarl.in . On top of this, we are planning to use upcycled plastic to create a podium for our pit display, by melting the plastic and then bending it into shape. We are also using plastic bottle caps in our wheels. Furthermore, we are using eco-friendly chalk spray paint and eco-friendly PLA to manufacture our car. 

  We are proud to announce the finale of the CAD tutorials has just been released! You can watch both the series at our YouTube channel here. We have two series in the CAD tutorials, entry and dev. Entry class uses the entry class no-go-zone, has less regulations and is slightly more basic and easier to follow. Dev class is more advanced, uses the dev class no-go-zone and has lots more regulations.  These are a great introduction to CAD in the F1 in Schools competition and we highly recommend watching them. They are also a great introduction to OnShape as a software for any CAD design. The series take you through a myriad a of tools and help you to boost your skills at CAD. Make sure to check out our other series for great tips and tricks with Graphic Design, Designing and Aerodynamics!

  Now that we are back into real life competitions, the pit display has become a really big element that we need to complete. We need to design it, print the graphics, and manufacture it! In pro class, we are judged on sustainability, content and visual appearance. All we are given is a 1x2m table and we have to build it around, the hardest part being transporting the items. We have designed three different initial ideas for our pit display:  The top design is V1, and the middle is V2 and the bottom is V3. When designing V1 we wanted to show off our merch and and cars as best as possible. We came up with a podium style design to fit with the F1 theme, and included our iconic three stripes. We also made smaller coasters at the front to display our cars in an evolution.  When designing V2 and V3, we wanted to incorporate more organic and flowing shapes into the pit display, through shelves. V2 has lower shelves which allow more space for graphics however hide the displayed ...

Did you learn lots from our Entry Class OnShape Tutorials? But where you in Dev Class and needed something more suited to your needs? Well, we've just launched the Dev Class OnShape Tutorials! You can watch the first two episodes here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4nQj4k99vEamlfvIXgfS0KKB1zg0DRGq   In this series, Rian takes you through how to model a basic Dev Class F1 in Schools car, in OnShape. You learn the basics of OnShape, as well as different modelling and sketching features to improve your car. This is a step-up from the Entry Class Tutorials, with more advanced features to further improve your CAD journey. This is a great way to start learning the basics of OnShape, and get you ready for Pro Class, and the rest of your CAD journey.  We really hope you enjoy this series! And remember to Subscribe to our channel for more videos on F1 in Schools!

  We are excited to announce the launch of a brand new series on our YouTube Channel !  The Aerodynamics Series will take you through the basics of aerodynamics! Led by Kai and Seb, our two Design Engineers, over several episodes you will learn about the basics of aerodynamics, from Drag to Biomimicry, they will cover almost everything! Along the way, we hope you will learn how air interacts with a car, and how to make your car go even faster. This is an excellent resource for everyone to use in their F1 in Schools journey, but also for everyone to learn about Aerodynamics.  We hope you enjoy this series, and remember to subscribe and ring the bell so you get notified when we launch our next videos in the series!

We are proud to announce that two new members have joined our team! Noah and Nathan have joined, and they bring unique skills and talents which we hope will help us get to the Nationals again! Noah is an excellent CAD engineer, and will take his skills to the DnE team. He will help model the cars, wheels and wind tunnel in CAD, to help refine and visualise designs. He will also help manufacture the cars, wheels, wind tunnel and pit display to bring them to life! He will also help with documenting all our DnE progress in the portfolio, and vital part of the judging criteria. We hope his skills will help Isaac, Kai and Seb boost their DnE progress, giving us a larger chance of getting to the Nationals. Nathan is an amazing Graphic Designer, and will bring his skills to the Enterprise team. He will help make graphics for the YouTube channel and website, and also for the portfolios. He will also help with Pit Display and Enterprise Portfolio. These are much needed skills to boost our Enter...

  This is going to be a quick blog, where we ae going to explain the importance of evaluations in your portfolios.  Evaluations are the reflection on something you have done in the competition. You need to include them in both your Enterprise and DnE Portfolios, but especially after CFD images. In our portfolio, we include them with every car design, and in each portfolio the last pafe is dedicated to evaluations.  Evaluations should include: What went well? How can you improve? What are your next steps? Have you achieved your targets from last time? What targets are you setting yourself? What challenges did you face? How did you overcome them and how can you prevent them? etc... They are really important to show the judges you understand your work, and you know how you can do better and what you're doing to improve. They want to see you learning and developing your STEM skills, this is what the competition is about after all.

  We've got a brand new sponsor! We would like to give a massive shoutout to KeyShot who have kindly given us sponsorship! They provide easy to use, professional looking renders with a whole load of Scientific materials, colours, and environments pre-loaded into the software! You can check out their amazing software and more information at keyshot.com .  They have kindly given us free access to their amazing software for us to render our merch, wind tunnel and more! Check out our website at teammarl.in   for when we start uploading our work! Also checkout our YouTube channel   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcJdE4myzsp3VXYxiXoULlg   where we will be uploading our soon to be tutorial! Hope you have a great day!

Have you been checking out our YouTube Channel recently?  If so, you may have noticed a brand new series being uploaded! We have recently been working on revamping our CAD Tutorials to make them even better and more personalised for your. Rian has been hard at work to bring the first series of refreshed CAD Tutorials: Entry Class. You can watch the entire series here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4nQj4k99vEbC5HMm78Uce2xsI2_kpRJE  In this series, Rian takes you through how to build an Entry Class F1 in Schools Car using OnShape. OnShape is a great online free (for academics) CAD software, especially for collaboration. Rian takes you through everything you need to know about this software to start your F1 in Schools journey. He takes you through how to import the no-go-zone and the basics of OnShape; how to build the main body with the loft feature; how to build the nose cone with the loft and guides feature; how to make the side pods and axle holes; how to cr...

We've reached the end of our Enterprise marathon! This is the final post, where we will talk about Project Management: the backbone of your team.  Project management is really important for planning your team members' work and making sure your team gets everything. This is mainly the job of the Team Manager, though all members need to agree on the basic strategy.  Collaboration and communication is the basics of good project management. There's no good creating a roadmap where one person has fifty tasks while the other members have three.  And you can't go to the other extreme, where you delegate tasks so everyone has exactly equal task numbers. You need to delegate them in such a way that everyone is working on what they love but also tackling their fair share of the work. Communication is also very important as most tasks will have multiple members working on them. You need to communicate with them to delegate the subtasks appropriately. You also need to communicate t...

Following on from our previous blog post on Branding, this week we wanted to talk about Marketing. Marketing is using your branding and your work to raise awareness of your team. This is really important for the competition as the judges love seeing unique ways o market your team. It also raises awareness of your team to attract potential sponsors.  There are lots of ways to market your team, in this post we are going to list the most common ones, and those used by us: Building a website is a great way to raise awareness of your team. It allows you to be searchable on google, and if you have unique enough a name then you can stand out. At our website (that you can visit at www.teammarl.in) we have included information about our team, our history, our values and information in the competition. This is also a great way to advertise your sponsors and it can act as a hub for all your other marketing, like blogs and YouTube.  Which brings us on to the next medium: YouTube. YouTube ...