What are STEM Ambassadors?

Stem Ambassadors are a group of over 28,000 individuals who offer their time, passion, and energy to visit schools, colleges, and youth group organisations to deliver requests from teachers and youth group leaders who want to link STEM subjects to the real world of work.

We have been really lucky that we have had some STEM Ambassadors visit our schools across our federation. https://www.ruytonschool.org.uk/

Jack Dove – How you can be your own hero

This is a little bit of information about Jack – (Jack shared with that that he is profoundly autistic and has had to overcome many obstacles to be in the job he is in now, including over 70 interviews for this position and discussing that finding a university to support him was very difficult)

Jack gave a short talk about how to be like your childhood heroes, his is Tim Peake.

I aim to one day, go to space like him, although I might never get there, I have already achieved as much as he has.

I have a masters degree, I have overcome tremendous challenges, I seek new challenges, try to give my time to others, pursue a variety of hobbies and like him, I reach out to younger students and encourage them to work hard to achieve their ambitions.

So again it is about trying to get younger people to see their heroes, as ordinary individuals who are truly no different to them, apart from the fact that they are just very lucky to have had the opportunity to do incredible things. Hopefully, they can see that they are more similar to their ideals that they realise and that they can achieve their dreams, in more ways they think.

I have so many qualities Tim Peake has and through STEM outreach, I see that I don’t have to be him to be as incredible as him.

The children were very engaged and had lots of questions for Jack, some are listed below;

Your job sounds like something from Apollo 13.

Where do you do your job?

How old were you when you got this job?

How long does it take to get to the space station? Do you think you’ll get there?

Have you applied to do a job like this on the space station?

What did you talk about with the astronaut you met?

What is the heaviest missile you’ve worked on?

Do you have any fears about space travel?

What would your dream job on the space station be doing?

LAURA MILLS & DESIGN ENGINEER / CAD LEAD

Delivered a presentation on what a nuclear engineer does, she talked about being a female in this male dominated industry.

Seena Mohan -TechWeCan Champion

Delivered a presentation to create an awareness to inspire more children, girls in particular to world of tech.

The children too part in question-and-answer sessions with Seena and were able to discuss technology for the future.

Victoria Fawcett – School space talk on black holes & journey to becoming an astronomer

Amanda Spindler – Tech We Can classroom activity

This presentation focused on bringing technology concepts to our students and brought an understanding of what it meant to have a job in tech. The presentation talked about areas our students could work in (e.g. sports, games, history etc.) to make the concepts more understandable for them.
More information can be found on the website https://techshecan.org/tech-we-can.

Amanda set the children a homework challenge to design a robot that helps around the home.

Some examples are below.