To celebrate our 30th Anniversary, we launched a STEM Competition for Secondary and Sixth Form Schools/Colleges within the Tamworth, Polesworth and Kingsbury area. As a specialist supplier of advanced materials & equipment, based in Wilnecote, Tamworth, we launched the competition to encourage young people in our local community to engage in STEM based activities and inspire them to look at further education and careers within STEM based industries.
Open to any school department, we asked school staff members to tell us how they would spend £1500 on a STEM focussed project, for the chance to win one of three £1500 prizes for their school to develop their STEM project idea! We work closely with researchers across the UK and Europe helping them take their ideas from theory to reality, therefore we wanted to do the same for three school based staff in our area, turning their STEM idea into reality!
Listen to Fiona Rouse, PI-KEM Ops Director, as she talks to Tamworth Radio, revealing the competition winners:
“We had some really brilliant project ideas coming in from the local schools," comments Fiona. "We were so impressed that we ended up awarding 5 prizes, one being for TEC, Belgrave because the passion that the staff showed was absolutely amazing. The overall Directors Award (an enhanced £2000 prize) went to their Science Department – they outshone everybody with the passion they showed – they did a video which was absolutely inspiring.”
We are delighted to announce the full list of winners, as below:
Director’s Award: Tamworth Enterprise College, Charlotte Doherty & Lauren Cox - STEM Project: To allow the Science Department to purchase robotics kits to enable students to have access to a world of robots and coding, making a difference for post 16 options and students future employability.
Winner: The Polesworth School, Michael Carroll - STEM Project: To purchase a 3D printer in order to establish an Engineering Club
Winner: The Rawlett School, Paul Bryant - STEM Project: The Geography Department propose to buy advanced weather equipment to be situated both around the site, as well as hand held equipment to study specific areas, allowing students, as well as the wider community, to take the complex theory of climate and make it common sense, by bringing abstract data into the hands of students.
Highly Commended: The Polesworth School, Sharon Leftwich-Lloyd - STEM Project: Allow the Drama department to purchase software to interpret sound waves to meet the needs of the performance in terms of length, volume, peaks and dips, allowing students to use visual graphs to see soundwaves form and pattern.
Highly Commended: The Rawlett School, Simon McIntyre - STEM Project: To purchase Lego Robot Inventor kits for a STEM Club, tapping into the quality resources, and competitions, of Lego and lessons learned from that, whilst also encouraging students to learn coding and become "robotics ambassadors".
We want to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the winners!
Look out for our social media posts for more details on the winning proposals, and how their projects are progressing.
