A team of Trinity Academy S3 pupils are the Scottish winners of Shell’s Bright Ideas competition, doubling up on last year’s success. The students’ Design and Technology Teacher, Trinity’s STEM Co-ordinator FLORENCE DONALDSON (pictured below (right) with the girls), explains all:
Wow! We have done it again, Shell Bright Ideas Scottish Winners for the second year in a row! What a phenomenal achievement!
In what has been an undoubtedly challenging time for all our students, five S3 girls worked tirelessly with their teacher Florence Donaldson throughout Lockdown to put together their outstanding proposal for Café Earth.
A huge congratulations to our fantastic S3 Design Team:
Ada Hayden-Joiner
Ava McKie
Cara Burnet
Iris Hughes
Rachel Baxendale
The Bright Ideas Challenge, which is organised by Shell, invited students to imagine what the world will be like in 30 years’ time, and to put their science, technology, engineering and maths skills to work to put together a proposal that would make the world a better place to live.
By 2050 there will be more than 9 billion people on Earth creating a need for 50% more energy than today. The competition asks pupils from across the UK to imagine innovative solutions to the energy challenges facing cities of the future.
The team researched the problem of sourcing food in a sustainable manner within cities. By using their science, technology, engineering knowledge, creative thinking, and problem-solving skills, they developed an innovative idea to solve the problem.
Their solution was create an eco-friendly café to help make our cities be cleaner and more energy efficient by utilising grants from the government and environmental charities to get started and with help from renewable energy professionals to ensure the energy produced is effective and safe.
Professional farmers, gardeners, chefs and waiting staff will make Café Earth run smoothly.
Most importantly, we will need the community: the community will keep our café running by coming to have a coffee, volunteer on our farm or visit Café Earth on a school trip.
Café Earth will serve the community. It will benefit everyone in the community, including families, teens, students and the elderly. The café will sell healthy affordable options.
The greenery around our café from our farms will provide short-term clean air. The plants will change the carbon dioxide we exhale into fresh oxygen. Our café will not contribute to harmful greenhouse gases. Not using fossil fuels will reduce carbon and make long term clean air.
Café Earth will also help businesses in the area. Products and from local businesses will be sold in the shop and produce we cannot grow ourselves will be bought from nearby farms. Finally, a part of our profits will feed back to community charities.
If you are interested, the full proposal for Café Earth can be found in the News section on Trinity Academy’s website.
The entry was Scotland’s winner, which means we will received £4,000 for our school to really bring our technology lessons to life, along with the pupil’s very own STEM themed prize packs to learn more about science, technology and engineering.
We are all incredibly proud of the girls achievements and we can only hope it inspires other young people to get excited about how designers, scientists, engineers and everyone in the technologies industries can make a difference.
Well done to all involved!