The Sussex & Surrey Institute of Technology were delighted to take part in the inaugural Teen Tech Festival at the Amex Stadium in Brighton on Thursday 16 November. This highly interactive event was designed to give Year 8 and Year 9 students and their teachers the opportunity to engage with leading-edge technology and to spend time with the scientists, technologists and engineers influencing their 21st century lives.
The IoT joined employers and higher education providers to offer interactive, technological challenges and hands-on activities, designed to give pupils an understanding of industry and the contemporary world of science, engineering and technology.
The team from Crawley College provided a motion-tracking setup. Using a Green-screen, hardware and software, students recreated movement and facial expressions on a range of digital characters. Northbrook College gave students the experience of operating commercial aircraft using VR headsets, which proved very popular, and they were assisted by three of our Level 4 engineering apprentices from Ceres Power. And the Sussex & Surrey IoT education partner the University of Sussex were there offering both insight and challenge sessions in physics and mathematics, product design and AI.
It was an excellent opportunity to introduce students to the new Sussex & Surrey IoT, and to inspire them to consider careers in science and technology, while dispelling gender stereotypes and shifting perceptions of careers teenagers may have dismissed as “geeky,” “difficult” or “boring”.
Students, teachers and ambassadors praised the quality of the interactive challenges, and we were impressed by the high-level of engagement of the young people from over 20 different schools in the region.
