A team from a high school in West Cumbria has made it to the national finals of an entrepreneurial competition.
The students from St Benedict’s Catholic High School in Whitehaven have made it to the national finals of the Amazon Longitude Explorer Prize this year.
The Amazon Longitude Explorer Prize, delivered by Nesta Challenges, pairs entrepreneurial skills not usually taught in the classroom with the STEM curriculum to encourage young innovators from across the UK aged 11-16 to create tech solutions to the big challenges of our time – like climate change, healthy living, ageing well and staying better connected.
The 40 teams in the running will now work with tech industry mentors to develop prototypes of their ideas ahead of the final judging in July where the winner will be awarded £20,000 for their school or youth group, while three runners up will win £5,000 each.
EcoKnow by Alisha Seath, 13, and Isabelle Ritchie, 14, at St. Benedict’s, is an app that scans household rubbish and indicates the nearest, suitable recycling point for the item in question, alongside information on its carbon footprint.
Their idea is all the more impressive that they developed and submitted it at the height of lockdown while working remotely.
As well as being paired with an industry mentor, the team will be supported with a hardware grant and will be invited to a virtual Enterprise Academy business day where they will learn important business skills to develop their idea into a real-world product.
