South African missile, unmanned air vehicle and space technology company Denel Dynamics has determined that an innovation in its annual engineering internship programme, introduced this year, has been a great success. This was the fifth year the company has run the programme.

"For this year's programme, for the first time as part of a purposeful strategy, some of the mentors were last year's interns, now working in the company as young engineers. This has worked incredibly well," Denel Dynamics Engineering Academy of Learning manager Shahen Naidoo told Engineering News Online on Thursday. "Part of the difficulties interns have is the technology, but part is adjusting to the company. And the previous year's interns have been through this." They thus complement the older mentors who have greater engineering, technological and organizational experience.

As a result, he hopes that some of the 2013 interns class will volunteer as mentors for the 2014 interns, and that some of the 2012 interns will join their older colleagues and mentor again. Mentoring at Denel Dynamics is purely voluntary. "There a two parts to the success of this programme: the inherent talent of the interns, which we need to nurture, and the mentors willing to transfer their knowledge and skills – they get no extrinsic reward."

Each year, the interns are given a product to develop. For 2013, they had to develop an intelligent grenade system, comprising an intelligent grenade launcher firing intelligent grenades. Key requirements to be met included the grenade being able to change course in flight and hit a 0.5 m x 0.5 m window, offset from the weapon's original trajectory, in five shots or less. The interns could not use compressed gas or pyrotechnics to power the launcher or propel the grenade.

This programme served to expose the interns to systems development, and teach them how to develop a project from design, through documentation, assembly, testing and demonstration. The interns have developed a technology demonstrator comprising a spring-powered launcher and a winged and steerable grenade. They have proceeded through all stages up to and including testing. Demonstration is scheduled for next week.

The result will not make a practical weapon at this stage of development, but that was not the point. "For me, the real product is the people coming out of the academy," affirmed Naidoo. "We have fast-tracked their experience to prepare them to become productive in a very short space of time. The programme has been highly successful, this year, again."

This year's intern class started out with 17 people; one resigned and left the company, two have gone to the University of Oxford to study for PhDs, and one has been sent by the company to Antarctica with a South African National Space Agency team as part of Denel Dynamics' developing space business. As a result, this year's programme was completed by 13 interns.