Eyes on the prize
Hampshire Life|January 2020
A trio of students from a Hampshire specialist school dug deep into their own experience to create a prize-winning invention
Eyes on the prize

Pupils from a specialist school taking part in a national STEM challenge are hoping to follow in the footsteps of their former classmates who won the inaugural competition.

Students from Southlands School came top of more than 60 entries for the Longitudes Explorer Prize when it was first launched in 2017. Their invention, the Octoptix, used internet technology to help people on the autistic spectrum better convey their emotions.

A team from the school is once more entering the competition, which is run by Nesta Challenges and supported by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and IBM.

“It was very difficult to explain to students at the beginning how much they were going to get out of it,” says teacher Guy Strath, who led the winning team. “It’s something that prepares them for real life.”

This story is from the January 2020 edition of Hampshire Life.

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This story is from the January 2020 edition of Hampshire Life.

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