Barton Peveril students impressed the organisers of the Big Bang Festival South East with two ingenious projects. They joined 9,000 young people from around the region at the South of England Showground at Ardingly to share their ideas and watch popular science in action.
Joe Slattery and Ryan Billings* presented their ‘Noctural Greenhouse’ and the ‘Stokey’ team of George Bates, Hannah Bray, Maisha Chaudhery and Tom Valois demonstrated their stock taking app for smartphones.
Noctural Greenhouse was a 50cm-sided cube made of flat pack panels and fitted with LED lighting to promote photosynthesis. It won the Ricardo Prize for Innovation and Technology at the Festival. Judges praised the model and the team’s confident presentation of their project as well as their additional research into the use of yeast to increase the amount of carbon dioxide within the cube.
The stocktaking app was designed to help warehouse staff check on stock levels. Judges said it was a great practical idea with real potential for small businesses and the team worked well together and was self-managed.
Maths teacher Jane Chapman worked with the students on this engineering extension initiative. “The teams did very well to come up with such innovative ideas and present them very professionally at the Festival.”
*Other team members not at the Festival were Thomas Field, Sophie Rouse, Jamie Fisher and Archie Hicks.
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