AN environmental monitoring project designed by Somerset school children was a runner-up in a national competition - securing a £5,000 prize. The Rainforest Dragen project - a piece of monitoring hardware for recording environmental data in communities living in and by rainforests to promote conservation - was created by youngsters at the Mendip Studio School, in Radstock. It has a companion website for sharing the data to enable young people across the world to build their own versions. The school will receive the £5,000 to boost projects. The idea was a runner-up to a two-way AI-enabled sign language translator designed by teenagers which won a £20,000 technology prize.
Emily Mortimer on her father’s advice: You can be anything as long as you are not boring
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By Ginny Dougary
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Emily Mortimer grew up with the Mitfords, in a manner of speaking. In the white, 1930s house with its pale-green slate roof in Turville Heath on the edge of the Chiltern Hills – which her father, the late QC and
Rumpole of the Bailey writer, John Mortimer, had inherited from his blind barrister father, Clifford – there would be frequent talk about that eccentric family, with its six famous daughters (and one son) of Lord and Lady Redesdale, known as Farve and Muv.
A two-way AI-enabled sign language translator designed by teenagers has won a £20,000 technology prize.
A team from St Paul’s Girls’ School in London came up with the idea for an intelligent real-time British Sign Language (BSL) translator after they were inspired by the experience of a friend who is deaf.
The Amazon Longitude Explorer Prize – for schools across the UK – calls on 11- to 16-year-olds to design, develop and build prototypes of technological solutions for some of the world’s biggest issues to deliver social good.
An insect-powered plastic digester, a personal Bluetooth pollution monitor, and a rainforest monitoring station were the ideas of the three runner-up teams who each secured £5,000 for their schools.
My father s advice: You can be anything as long as you are not boring theage.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theage.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Britain’s private schools lost their grip on Oxbridge
“Five years ago, my son would have got a place at Oxford. But now the bar has shifted and he didn’t,” says my friend, a City of London executive who has put several children through elite private schools in Britain. “I think he got short-changed.”
I’ve been hearing this more and more from fellow parents with kids at top day and boarding schools in recent years. Some of it sounds like whining: most of us like to think the best of our progeny. But my friend has a point. After years of hand-wringing about unequal access to elite higher education, admissions standards are finally shifting.