Five Year 10 students scooped prizes worth £12,500 by winning Microsoft’s STEM Student Challenge for 2017.

The Challenge aims to help UK students connect the dots between the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects they study today and the impact those subjects could have on their ability to be part of the next generation of technology heroes and teams were tasked to come up with an original technology idea which they felt could exist in 20 years’ time.  They then had to create a video to depict their idea.

The Peterborough School students designed a drone which could take air samples and pictures, helping aid agencies to predict outbreaks of deadly diseases.  Named after the Greek god of medicine, their ‘Asclepius Drone’ would combine sensors, cameras, image recognition software and cloud computing to improve the health of millions of people in the developing world.

After wowing the judging panel comprising a scientist, researcher and an engineer at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Dyuti Chakraborty, François Van Cauwenbergh, Marcus Akester, Rhys Williams and Thomas Smith each walked away with a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet laptop and a £5,000 cheque for the School.  They beat 10 other teams who were in the final and around 260 schools entered in total.

Dyuti Chakraborty was amazed to win, saying “It’s so great that our team was recognised for our idea and all the hard work we put in has paid off.  I really enjoyed the opportunity and it’s a very good way to encourage pupils to be inventive and think outside the box while raising awareness of STEM subjects”.

Martin Webb, Head of Computing and Digital Strategy at the School, said the win would have a positive effect on every pupil he teaches:  “Not only will this encourage students to invent the future, it will also help other pupils become more involved in thinking about technology and what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years’ time.  This competition has already helped to promote computer science as it is spot on in terms of what we should be teaching our children”.