This week, click three pupils from Rendcomb College were announced as the winners of the national Longitude Explorer Prize in a ceremony hosted at the 2015 Teen Tech event in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London on Tuesday, 1 December.
The first prize winners, who were awarded a £25,000 prize, were a team of three girls from Rendcomb College; an independent, co-educational day and boarding school for children aged three to 18 in Gloucestershire.
Launched by UK innovation charity Nesta in November 2014, the Longitude Explorer Prize is a youth-focused challenge for secondary school students, which aims to expand their abilities in technological creativity.
The Rendcomb College team took home first prize with their mobile app Displaced, which uses live data on homeless people and refugees collected from postings on social media accounts. With location data and notes provided by users, the app will allow charities to better coordinate the logistics of supporting vulnerable people around the world.
The all-girl team of Grace Balchin, Emily Sharman and Eleni Dimopoulos presented their idea at the Teen Tech event to hundreds of local school pupils and judges, as well as meeting companies such as SalesForce, Bloomberg and the BBC.
In the spirit of the 18th century Longitude Prize – which set the task of determining a ship’s exact location at sea – the contest focused on navigational technology. Groups of 11-16-year-olds across the country took up the challenge of using satellite location data to solve social challenges.
Of the 67 teams who entered the competition, 12 finalists were selected to present their ideas to judges and other students at Teen Tech. The judges praised the breadth of ideas and high quality of the entries.
Rendcomb College pupil Emily Sharman said: “We’re really happy – and shocked… in a good way! We put a lot of effort into the project. It was definitely a great experience and helped us learn a lot of new skills – product design, marketing and software development. They’re probably not things you usually expect 15-year-old girls to be doing.”
Constance Agyeman, development manager at Nesta said: “We would like to congratulate all of the winners of the competition, along with all of the other Longitude Explorer finalists. The standard of entry to the competition was excellent and it was a very hard job for the judges to select just three. It is so encouraging to see so many young people energised by the idea of using digital creativity to solve social challenges.”