Science at Heart School Team Prize 2021

Science at Heart School Team Prize 2021

The British Heart Foundation’s Centre of Research Excellence at Imperial College London offered our first ever School Team Prize to engage future scientific leaders with cardiovascular health and research. We invited school students to form a team and compete for a financial prize.
Their challenge was to design an ePoster which illustrated a strategy for combining hard sciences with biomedicine to reduce the number of deaths and disabilities caused by heart and circulatory disease.

We encouraged students to consider the following:

• Heart and circulatory disease is a leading cause of death and chronic ill health around the world
• Scientific progress comes from a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing different specialities together to challenge thinking (medicine, biology and hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, computers, mathematics, engineering)
• The development and implementation of advances need skills not just in science, but in design and communication

We gave the following instructions:

• The judges would be looking for innovative ideas, a striking ePoster design and original illustrations
• The e-Poster should be pitched to communicate to non-experts, for example fellow sixth form students
• The ePoster was not expected to cover the whole breadth of heart and circulatory disease – it was better to focus on a particular aspect
• Teams could choose whether to address a UK or global issue(s) in the ePoster
• Teams were free to choose the design of the ePoster but were advised to describe clearly what problem they were addressing, the anticipated innovation(s), and steps along the way to implementation.

The competition was restricted to Teams from the United Kingdom schools and each educational organisation was asked submit one e-Poster by the deadline of the 30th June 2021. We had 46 schools who submitted posters, out of which ten teams were short-listed to present their ePosters to a multi-disciplinary and diverse panel of judges. This year four Schools were given prizes for their poster – they were:

• First Prize: Featherstone School ‌
• Second Prize: Yarm School ‌
• Joint Third Prize: - Concord College & Malvern St James ‌

First, second and third prizes of £3000, £2000 and £1000 (shared) were awarded to schools for supporting science-related activities. Feedback and mentoring meetings were arranged for each of the ten finalist teams with Imperial Staff.