Budding Engineers Win Inspiration Award

A team of Second Year girls made it to the finals of the annual PA Consulting Raspberry Pi Competition held in London in early May.

Using engineering and coding skills, the competition asked students to programme a Raspberry Pi microcomputer to come up with inspiring solutions to global challenges.

Our budding engineers Megan, Jess and Amber (AKA Team 'Slayalicious'), designed and built an underwater submarine that could search the ocean looking for high temperatures indicating locations of thermal energy that could be used to generate electricity sustainably.

The girls really impressed everyone with their innovation

Having successfully tested it in the school swimming pool, they were in confident mood for the finals!

On the day, a further competition was organised to find the team that could design and build the fastest race car to make it down a track by modifying a car template provided. The girls really impressed everyone with their innovation by cleverly reversing the template, putting the majority of the weight at the front. This strategy meant they won every race - including against the Sixth Form age-group and even the engineers who built the track! For that they were awarded both medals and a cup. 

The finals involved hours of judging of both the team members and their Raspberry Pi projects. They were absolutely brilliant at networking and impressed everyone with their energy, communication skills and most of all their personality and friendliness. As a result of all their hard work, Team Slayalicious won the inspiration award for their age group. For this, as well as a lovely trophy, they won £1,000 to be shared between the three of them!

A full gallery of photos can be seen over on our Flickr page.

Special mention should also go to another team who also worked very hard, but just missed out on a place in the finals. Eliza, Kate, Maisie and Saphia created a working model wind-turbine to teach people about renewable energy sources.