By Nanthana L, Ariana G and Millie  A, Year 10

The RSA Pupil Design Awards is a national design competition for secondary school and sixth-form pupils aged 11-18, where participants are encouraged to use their creativity and imagination to tackle real challenges facing people and the planet to create a product which fits in with one of the RSA briefs.

In total the RSA gives three briefs, for this year, it was about Learning to Belong, Food for Thought and Green Spaces. All these briefs were very broad allowing students to take their own perspective on each of them. Two groups from NHEHS were shortlisted therefore we were able to attend the award show on June 29th which involved many activities to enhance our skills. 

At the beginning of the day, we did a few activities with the rest of the RSA finalists and winners, including exercises that aided us in furthering our thought processes to do with our products and just explaining them to the group. Then we listened to some speakers and took part in a designing activity to do with a previous winner of this competition. The activity was to cut out weather symbols that reflect our emotions which will then be used to make a garment of clothing. To end the day off,  we collected our awards and were introduced to the rest of the products and listened to last year’s winner speak about her experience. We were also lucky to listen to other speakers. 

Overall, the day was really great, and we had so much fun enhancing our knowledge and being able to take this for our NEA projects for GCSE. Through this day we were able to take and learn new skills that were taught by some of the speakers and adapt it to for our own project ideas which was really helpful.