Ten primary and four secondary schools from the Sheffield City Region are taking part in the Primary Engineer & Secondary Engineer Leaders’ Awards organised by the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) to inspire future engineering talent.

The AMRC (www.amrc.co.uk) has teamed up with Primary Engineer (www.primaryengineer.co.uk) — a national not-for-profit organisation that is bridging the gap between industry and education by developing engineering skills for teachers — to launch the scheme.

The 14 schools will have access to the resources and training facilities available at the AMRC to bring engineering to life in the classroom by helping pupils to build model cars — from basic ‘apprentice level’ for early years to more advanced ‘engineer’ models for older pupils.

Each school will be allocated a ‘classroom engineer’ to support the sessions, and an event will be held at the AMRC where teams from each school will bring along their project entries and compete against each other.

There is a further opportunity for young people to get creative with engineering through the Primary Engineer and Secondary Engineer Leaders’ Award competition, which is open to all school-age children in the Sheffield City Region.

“If you were an engineer, what would you do?” is the question that will be posed to children entering the competition, who will then have to identify a real-world problem, design a solution and write a letter to the engineer saying why they should make it.

Every child that submits an entry will have their design assessed by an engineer and receive a certificate.

A prototype of the winning design will then be built by the AMRC.