This afternoon, I had the honour and pleasure to visit Broadwater School in Godalming to meet some Year 9 pupils who are innovators and award winners! The school had entered Cisco’s Little Big Award competition back in October of last year and made it to the Surrey Finals which were held last month at Cisco’s UK headquarters in Bedfont Lakes in Middlesex.
The Little Big Awards is an out-reach program for schools which aims to encourage students to get involved with technology, through challenging them to come up with a technology innovation that ‘connects the unconnected’. The schools’ ideas are judged on a number of criteria, including the business case, creativity and usability of the design, presentation skills and documentation. This is the 3rd year in a row that Broadwater School have won an award in the finals! This year they won the ‘Creativity, Design and Usability’ category for their product concept based on wearable technology to help the hearing and visually impaired. 
I was particularly interested to hear Broadwater School had encouraged all it’s pupils a Key Stage 3 to form teams to come up with creative ideas. The ‘HearSee’ concept emerged as the most likely to be commercially viable and was entered into the competition. The boys had really thought about the user problem that they were trying to solve – in this case their idea is to help visually and hearing impaired individuals to be provided information about their immediate environment through internet-connected eye glasses which can connect to a cochlea implant, or provide text-to-speech. They had researched the idea very thoroughly, created graphical design documentation and produced a prototype. It’s exciting to see how innovative and yet thorough these young people can be and bodes well for these talented and ambitious students to potentially pursue fulfilling careers within the IT sector in the years to come.
The Little Big Awards competition is open to all schools in Surrey, and the competition is designed to get children in years 8-10 age group interested in the application of technology and to give them an understanding of the commercial side of the business as well as the technical. The competition kicks off again in September and each school is assigned at least 2 mentors from Cisco to help and advise the teams. The mentoring program ensures that the pupils benefit from industry expertise coming directly into the school environment and help relate what happens in the workplace, passing on their knowledge and help to guide and inspire the next generation of the industry. Specific thanks to my colleague Adam Davies who has mentored Broadwater School for the past 3 years.
Schools and Cisco mentors are encouraged to get involved – please contact Rob May robemay@cisco.com or myself for further information.
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