Rebecca Jones, the CILIP Information Literacy Group’s School Representative, reports on her attendance at the TeenTech 2016 Award ceremony that took place at Buckingham Palace in October. The CILIP Information Literacy Group, in partnership with the TeenTech initiative, presented a Research and Information Literacy Award for 11-16 year olds to celebrate how well young people can dispel the ‘Google Generation’ myth and show that they can be truly information literate researchers.
This year I was fortunate enough to represent the Information Literacy Group at the TeenTech prize giving ceremony that was held at Buckingham Palace and hosted by HRH Duke of York. The TeenTech Awards were established in 2012-13 to encourage students to think about how they can apply science and technology to real world problems. This year was the second time that the award for Research and Information Literacy has been presented.
All the winners from the finals that were held at The Royal Society in June were present, along with their respective teacher, mentor or librarian in the case of the team from Oakham school who won the ILG Research and Information Award with their innovation K-Charge.
It was inspiring to hear about the development since the Summer with some of the projects which included sponsorship deals, manufacturing plans and collaboration with industry to turn their winning ideas into actual products. The progress and opportunities that these pupils had created for themselves by responding to TeenTech is really impressive.
Maggie Philbin, CEO of TeenTech introduced and interviewed the winners and the Duke of York gave a short speech at the end of the presentations congratulating the winners on their creativity and determination. This year winners were invited to act as ambassadors for the competition and to inspire other young people to take part and innovate.
All the teams had brought along their design boards and were able to talk about their ideas to other schools and the sponsors. It was a very special occasion that both I and all the winners will remember. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the perseverance, creativity, and determination that has lead to successful teamwork, research and development.
The next round of the awards are now open for teams to enter – full details are on the TeenTech website. The ILG has also produced some resource sheets for schools to support effective and efficient research.
ILG also hope to be running an Innovation Day in December in Manchester with more details coming soon!
Read more about the 2016 awards and winners.
Rebecca Jones