It has been an amazing few months for STEM initiatives at Glan-y-Mor, Burry Port.
They culminated in the school being short-listed as one of the five schools for the Young Engineers’ School of the Year in Britain.
This competition will be judged at the Big Bang Event at the NEC in March, where it already has pupils competing in another National STEM competition, The National Science and Engineering Competition.
All the hard work that has gone on at the school was recognised recently when Huw Lewis, Minister for Education and Skills in Wales, visited and was extremely impressed with the innovation and initiative pupils in their STEM projects.
In November, the winning TeenTech team attended Buckingham Palace for a winner’s reception with HRH The Duke of York.
In December, Annie Williams was awarded the top innovation prize for her G.C.S.E D&T coursework project and received her award at a special ceremony at the Senedd.
Glan-y-Mor had a transition team and senior team in the First Lego League regional competition in Swansea.
The competition involves programming Lego robots to carry out missions on the specially designed challenge table and pupils had to use their engineering skills to design and build a robot to carry out all the different missions.
The senior team called Digital Devils won the competition beating the other 11 teams by a clear hundred points and took part in the British Finals at Loughborough University.
In the National Science and Engineering Competition the A Brains and Team Jewel were selected to take part in the finals of this prestigious national competition, where there were more than 2500 entries across the 4 categories.
The teams will be exhibiting their work at the Big Bang Event at the NEC in March, where 75,000 people are expected to visit and the final judging will take place during the event.
During the last week of the autumn term five teams of pupils worked on entries for the Alu Challenge and had to design garden buildings and vehicles using aluminium and other sustainable materials.
They won both the categories entered and had the runner up in one of the categories, so the teams have won £1300 worth of equipment for the school as well as cash prizes for themselves. They are due to attend a celebration award ceremony at the Thinktank Museum in Birmingham on Wednesday, 24 February.
