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Last week Helen Critcher, Community Development Advisor, attended the KM Bright Spark Awards at Discovery Park in Sandwich.  The community initiative, which aims to promote science, technology, engineering and maths, is a celebration of bright young minds and is open for primary and secondary school teams of all ages to enter. It’s important to give young people a chance to be creative, work together to solve a problem or invent something that could improve people’s lives and Bright Sparks does this in a fun and modern way.

Finalists were invited to the annual awards event, to showcase their science projects in front of a panel of experts; known as ‘the dragons’. The students were filmed in advance talking about the project which was screened on Friday before they took to the stage to present their ideas in more detail.  

There were three judging panels of dragons who then had four minutes to ask questions to the teams.  After all 10 schools had presented the dragons came together to decide on the overall winner who would receive a prize of £500, which was awarded to Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar School for their project on ‘Does Biodiversity make us happy?’ Their investigation involved testing more than 600 individuals to confirm a positive correlation between spending time in the school’s orchard and improved psychological and physiological wellbeing.

Helen said: "Each dragon bought along an experience prize and ours was awarded to Invicta Girls Grammar School for their project on ‘Is there life out there?’  The entries this year were fantastic and innovative and we are proud to be a sponsor of this annual competition."

Find out more or view a short video from the awards.