PA Consulting invites schools to take part in its Raspberry Pi coding competition and innovate to save the planet

PA Consulting is inviting schools to take part in its 10th annual Raspberry Pi coding competition. This year’s competition asks students between the ages of 8 and 18 to innovate to save the planet, challenging them to design technology that will help make the world a more sustainable place. The UK competition launches in parallel with PA’s Netherlands edition of the competition, which is in its fourth year.

PA’s annual Raspberry Pi Competition promotes STEM education by challenging students to invent products and processes that could benefit society, by using their technology and coding skills.

As the UN shares a bleak outlook on climate change, the need to act quickly on sustainability has never been more apparent. With the world’s attention soon to be on COP26, this is the ideal time to get students to delve deeper and explore how they can find a solution to this pressing issue – an issue that teachers, students and our partners selected when we put this year’s theme to a public vote.

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 present their inventions in front of a panel of expert judges at the PA Raspberry Pi Awards Day in April 2022, where the winner from each category will be awarded £1,000 for their school or college.

The UK partners supporting the competition this year include Nationwide Building Society, Anglia Ruskin University, Rentokil Initial and Rolls-Royce.

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, partners and teachers who have taken part in previous competitions.
• A dedicated and interactive kick-off support session for each team with tech experts from one of PA’s partner organisations.
• Raspberry Pi starter kits for the first 100 teams to enter the competition.

Frazer Bennett, chief innovation officer at PA Consulting, said: “The ingenuity of children and young people is remarkable and this competition, which promotes STEM education, gives them the opportunity to thrive and spark new ideas. At PA, we understand the power of combining technology and innovation and each year I am amazed by the commitment, teamwork and technical ability displayed by the students who take part – as well as their enthusiasm for creating a positive human future.

As this year is the tenth anniversary of the competition, we wanted to make things bigger and better, so we've chosen the big issue of climate change as the perfect platform to get the teams thinking about what part they can play in doing their best to save the planet, for their generation and beyond.”

Details of how to enter can be found here.