Look to the future to inspire your students today!

The Bright Ideas Challenge, Shell’s national schools’ competition, now in its third year opened for entries last month. With the 2018 Year of Engineering coming up, Shell is calling on schools across Great Britain to take up this pressing challenge to help inspire the UK’s future generation of scientists and engineers.

The Bright Ideas Challenge invites young people aged 11-14 to use their STEM skills to come up with ‘bright ideas’ to power the cities of 2050, helping them to become vibrant, healthy and clean places to live.

A total of £45,000 worth of educational prizes will be awarded to 13 winning teams across the UK. The prize for the best ‘bright idea’ is £5,000 to super-size STEM teaching at the winning school.

In addition to being awarded money prizes for their schools, all winning team members will receive a trip to London where they will be VIP guests at Make the Future Live, Shell’s four-day festival of innovation.

The Bright Ideas Challenge is designed to help teachers deliver the STEM curriculum in a way that inspires students to see that the STEM skills they are accumulating in the classroom can help them make a positive difference to our world.

Young people are encouraged to enter in teams of up to five with an emphasis put on effective team working.  This ensures that the challenge also helps students develop skills such as problem solving, communication, resilience and teamwork that will be valued in the workplace.

Ingenious ideas generated by the competition in previous years include piezoelectric sensors in pavements that convert the vibrations of pedestrians’ footsteps into electrical energy, salt-water powered vehicles and bacteria generators that convert food waste in future homes into a source of heat, light and power.

If you think your students have what it takes to come up with similarly ‘bright ideas’, why not register today?  You can find a host of free curriculum linked resources, warm up challenges, inspiration from previous entrants and tips on creating winning entries at www.shell.co.uk/brightideaschallenge, as well as the competition terms and conditions.

In a first this year, schools that enter before 5pm on January 19, 2018 will be entered into an ‘early bird’ prize draw to win a facilitated STEM workshop at your school, so there’s every reason to make this the term that you enter. All entries close at 5pm on April 27, 2018.