Leonardo hosts Go4SET South East competition
The 2016 Go4SET South East Electronics challenge, launched at ARM’s Cambridge office back in January, reached its conclusion with a celebration and assessment day hosted by Leonardo in Luton on Friday 11th March. There were 13 teams of children from schools across the region who presented Electronics-inspired projects to assessors.
A mixed-gender team of six students from Parmiter’s School, Watford, were awarded top prize for their project to improve the school registration system through use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The team was mentored by Imagination Technologies.
Dr Jasbir Singh Lota, Head of STEM and Chemistry Tutor at Parmiter’s School, said: “The Go4SET programme allows me, and company mentors, to create great conditions for students to learn and teach each other. Students are empowered to pursue their projects by being engaged as they can be creative and enhance their skills which are not normally exhibited whilst ‘doing’ the normal school curriculum. Students over the 10-week period learn mental, emotional and social skills which will prepare them life after school. In essence they gain confidence and passion to succeed in a fun and challenging environment. The best part of their project is that they make new friendships with people they would not normally mix with.”
The students had great things to say about their Go4SET experience:
“I have learnt so many different things from this GO4SET project. At first I stuck to what I knew, I tallied up all the results from the surveys and made them into graphs … However, as I started to gain confidence I tried new things out of my comfort zone. For example, I tried to do a section of the Arduino coding of our project. I found it really interesting and it’s so satisfying when it works! I learnt so much about Arduino’s, which I’d never even heard of but can now program, electronics and coding. In future I’m going to use these new skills to carry on exploring coding and electronics … I have really enjoyed this project, it’s been a steep learning curve but I’ve loved how challenging it’s been and I really enjoyed working with my team to overcome these problems. GO4SET has also taught me lots about this industry, especially from visits to Imagination Technologies where I learnt a lot about the work engineers do … it has really inspired me.”
“I massively enjoyed this Go4Set project as it has been an amazing time learning new skills, and friends along the way … Personally what I gained the most is programming, [which] allowed me to expand my knowledge of computing and the career paths computing has.”
“When I started this project, I didn’t really know about the area we were working in, but now that we have done it I feel that I know a lot more about electronics and the system we have been using. Not only have I been learning new skills in STEM subjects, especially Electronics, but I have also been developing more logical thinking, problem solving and IT skills.”
For more information
Go4SET was developed by the UKESF in partnership with EDT to engage children aged 12–14 with hands-on design challenges that prompt them to apply Electronics solutions to real-life problems. Find out more here.