It’s called brick building but it’s really an exercise in learning how to fashion many pieces of wood into one geometrically perfect circle.

That was our two-day learning challenge this week, giving our students just 48 hours to fashion 32 carefully-cut pieces of pine into four layers to create a hollow wooden structure.

Once the structure had been securely glued and clamped, the next step was to externally and internally make the crude circle into a perfect circle using a bandsaw and bobbin sander.

It’s a project for students to practice their geometric and precise cutting skills and in using, for some students, new pieces of equipment.

It’s a skill that some of our students may never use again in their professional careers, but it’s a valuable skill to have and demonstrates how, if correctly measured and cut, how a great many small pieces of wood can be shaped to create a completely different object.

It’s also a confidence-builder as all our students have created a simple, functional but complex piece in only a couple of days.

Pictured: Jacob Corradi from Oxfordshire looking happy!