The Farm Urban team were thrilled to be a part of this year’s Big Bang North West on 4 July. Taking place at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool, pupils from schools across the North West came out in their droves for a day of discovery. They had the opportunity to meet face-to-face with inspiring engineers and scientists from industry and academia and take part in a whole host of hands-on activities and experiments.
We love Big Bang’s approach to engaging young people in Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths (STEM). The event offers a huge range of exhibition stands (including ours!) with exciting and interactive activities, shows and information, which aim to amaze and inspire the scientists and engineers of the future. The ‘make it happen’ motto is certainly a part of our philosophy here at Farm Urban.
This year we invited students to take part in our Produce Pod Challenge. Throughout the day teams competed to build our Produce Pod aquaponics system as quickly as possible. The catch … there were no instructions! Like any true scientists, the teams had to work it out for themselves and explain how it worked once they had completed the build. We were incredibly impressed by the speed and ingenuity with which everyone tackled the challenge.
The winning team on the day, from St Michael’s High School in Liverpool, completed their build in an astounding 5 minutes and 35 seconds! If only we could build the pods that quickly ourselves. We’re looking forward to heading out to the school soon to deliver their prize – one of our half day workshops, which will challenge more of the pupils to complete the build and learn in greater detail how aquaponics works.
Our smoothie bar also proved to be a big hit at the event, with students and teachers keen to sample one of our aquaponic Farm Urban Super Smoothies, made with greens grown in our systems. People were also able to check out our TED talk and have a go at some water testing in our aquaponics lab.
It was an incredible day and we’re felt very privileged to be a part of it. We had great fun ourselves checking out all of the other exhibitor stands and were very impressed by the student projects entering The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers competition. We’re especially excited to have some of the students that we met attending our School for Eco-Entrepreneurs this August. We hope we managed to inspire some future Agtech innovators and entrepreneurs … they certainly inspired us!