Hello, Jannath — I am sorry that I missed replying to you here.

I never managed to align our Year 9 Signature Work Inquiry with the TeenTech Awards this year, mainly because our timetable changed substantially (see this post in Year 9 (Grade 8) Interdisciplinary Signature Work Inquiry @ Blanchelande College). However, I have ideas for next year that I will share here once I know whether the format will remain unchanged, or not.

Additionally, having now run the TeenTech Awards twice as a weekly 45-minute Scholars’ Society Activity (see here in Library news), we have some very clear ideas about how to do this even better next year, which I will also share here in due course.

In the meantime, we have just submitted our Innovation Logs for this year’s Awards (see below from Library news):

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Our TeenTech Scholars have wrapped up a busy term by submitting their Innovation Logs for the national qualifying round of the highly competitive TeenTech Awards.

Innovation Logs, which detail the development of their ideas to make the world a better place to live in, can be up to 15 pages long. This year we have 15 students in Years 7-9 competing in 8 Teams, who between them averaged 14 pages / 2,798 words per Innovation Log. This is an extraordinary achievement, given the exceptional quality of their work—for perspective, the Year 10 HPQ research report is 2,000 words.

This year’s submissions are:

• Ambient Audio-Visual (Matthew in Y7 & Genevieve in Y8) | Ambient Music audio-visualised as environment for inducing calm and a space to think.
• Ball Buddy (Isabella & Isla in Y7) | An interactive robot that can play a variety of ball games, particularly aimed at children who have no-one to play or train with.
• Construct-O-Bot (Dexter & Felix in Y7) | Construction robots designed to work alongside humans providing support with dangerous, difficult or unpleasant tasks such as clearing asbestos.
• Dip Diagnostics (Jake in Y7 & Alexander in Y8) | A cheap and easy-to-use test for bacteria in swimming pool water.
• Hydraband (Sienna in Y9) | A stylish, low-cost wearable device for the biometric tracking of dehydration levels and incentivising hydration.
• Savvy Shopper (Alice, Effie & Lucia in Y7) | A smart shopping trolley that utilises RFID technology to adapt to different shopping styles and needs, including an edutainment mode for shoppers with young children.
• Sleep Pad (Henrietta in Y7) | A tablet-style device with accompanying app to help children to develop and maintain healthy sleep habits.
• WoodlandWardens (Edouard & Reuben in Y8) | A spider-like robot whose primary function is to survey trees and report on their health and structural integrity in order to minimize costly storm damage. More broadly, a suite of robots with different shapes adapted to different kinds of woodlands and forests.

Should any Teams progress through the qualifying round, they will compete in the Final at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in London at the end of June. While we are hopeful for a return to the IET—following rEcycle and Co‘s success last year—and wish our Scholars well, we are all in agreement with Richard Feynman that

the [real] prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery.

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