PA Consulting invites schools and colleges to innovate to accelerate energy transition

PA, the consultancy that’s bringing ingenuity to life, launches its 11th Raspberry Pi coding competition in support of National Coding Week – a week dedicated to promoting coding and digital literacy in schools.

This year’s theme will challenge students between the ages of eight and 18 to ‘innovate to accelerate energy transition’ and come up with an innovation that could help to either reverse the effects of climate change or respond to the challenge of providing affordable energy.

The competition is a celebration of STEM education, giving schoolchildren the opportunity to invent something that could benefit society. Using their imagination, coding skills and a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, students can put their ingenuity to the test to come up with inspiring solutions to this global challenge.

Teams compete across four categories based on their academic years: years 4-6, years 7-9, years 10-11 and years 12-13. Three finalists from each category are invited to the PA Raspberry Pi Awards Day event in London in spring 2023. A panel of expert judges will select a winner from each of the four categories, who will be awarded with £1,000 for their school or college.

Frazer Bennett, Chief Innovation Officer at PA Consulting, said: “With the world’s attention on the current energy crisis and with access to resources declining and costs rising, this is a fitting time for students to explore a solution to these issues – an issue that teachers, students, and our partners from leading industry organisations selected when we asked them for their ideas for this year’s theme.

“We think that the ingenuity of children is astounding, and they have a knack of coming up with new ideas none of us would have thought of. Through this competition we seek to enhance and promote STEM education combined with innovation and ingenuity and it genuinely excites us to see what clever solutions the teams come up with, to tackle these big challenges head on.”

PA has worked hard to lead by example in accelerating energy transition across the globe, ranging from working with the Royal College of Art to design an iconic electric vehicle charger to encourage the switch to EVs in the UK, to working with AMP capital to accelerate the transition to electric bus services in Latin America to improve air quality through zero-emission transportation.

To support the teachers and teams during the competition, PA has put in place a comprehensive set of free resources, which include:

• A webinar for teachers full of hints and tips to guide their teams, presented by PA’s experts and partners who have supported previous competitions.
• A dedicated and interactive kick-off support session available for the teams with tech experts from one of PA’s partner organisations.
• Raspberry Pi starter kits for the first 100 teams to enter the competition.

Last year’s competition asked teams to innovate to save the planet. Winning entries included recycling stations which help to inform, educate, and raise awareness about environmental issues, an automatic bin opener that sorts rubbish using AI and a project to reduce the volume of greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere each year by the transportation of food.