Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. To celebrate, RAL will be hosting an online computing challenge day for classes of students from Year 8 or 9.

The event is designed to introduce students to the excitement of computing - teams will be given a (top secret!) challenge and will spend the day using Arduinos and computer programming to find a solution.

After an introduction via Zoom, each school will be introduced to their mentors, who will help and support the teams throughout the day. Teams will need access to a computer with internet access to complete the exercises.

The exercises can be completed entirely virtually, using a browser, but we are able to send a small number of schools hardware (Arduino kits) to enable their students to create physical (as well as virtual) solutions to the challenges. Please indicate whether you would like to receive the Arduino kits in the applicatio nform.

The day will also include a behind-the-scenes virtual tour of our scientific computing facilities, as well as a short careers talk. The day has been designed to be flexible so that school breaks can be accommodated - and if you would like, you can join for the tour and careers talk without taking part in the exercise: please tick that option when registering.

During this event, each class will work (via Zoom) with a pair of mentors from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory - this means that our capacity is limited by the number of mentors we have available. We will let all schools know if they have been successful in obtaining places by 22 September 2021.

If you have any questions, please email visitral@stfc.ac.uk