Youth STEMM Award

Making a virtue of necessity

In normal times there is surely hardly anywhere in the country which offers young women with a particular inclination towards Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics or Medicine more ways of extending their interests beyond the bounds of the A Level curricula.

But these are abnormal times, and instead of following in the footsteps of their predecessors, and availing themselves of the opportunities afforded by the seven Cambridge science museums, public lectures, the Cambridge Science Festival, Big Biology Day and Cambridge Central Library (in its physical manifestation), not to mention school events such as Technology Day and Careers Evening, and work experience in companies and laboratories, this year’s Youth STEMM Award (YSA) candidates have had to find other ways of enriching their experience and satisfying its requirements.

Our STEMM Award students

That they have risen to this challenge splendidly will be clear from the following accounts by our four Lower Sixth participants:

Inspiring the next generation

As part of the ‘Inspiring the next generation’ section of the STEMM Award, we decided to launch a poster competition for the lower school.

Initially, this was intended to provide a science presence on a notice board in the dining room which students could not miss, but due to Covid-19, the competition had to go virtual – thereby creating an opportunity for both us and the participants to improve our digital design skills.

The idea was that students would research something science-related for a specific month and then produce a poster on this newsworthy event and send it to us. We would then judge the posters, select the best for publication and reward the winners. We made some example posters to demonstrate what we were looking for, including ones on specific achievements of Alexa Canady, Bill Gates and Shinya Yamanaka.

As Covid-19 restrictions prevented us from being in the same room as younger students, we decided to record the instructions for the Lower School and share them as a Loom presentation. We spent some time learning the mechanics of Loom, a program that allows you to record voices over a PowerPoint presentation –  but we picked it up quite quickly and worked out how to edit our presentation afterwards too, so that it flowed well.