Leigh-on-Sea’s Young Inventors Winner Ria February 10, 2015 Local News, Southend Back in October 2014, Rapid Online invited over 1000 primary schools to take part in a “Young Inventor” competition to find the country’s most creative young mind. The school children invited to take part were between the ages of 7 – 11 years old, meaning that there were bound to be some extremely creative inventions that only a child seeing the world through a child’s eyes would be able to envision! With a deadline of November 2014, over 250 designs poured in – with many more unfortunately missing the deadline. Each entry received a score out of ten for three distinct elements: Creativity Practicality of Invention Drawing The winner of the Young Inventors competition (and four runners up) would receive a LEGO Education WeDo Construction Set and accompanying Software and Activity Pack for their classroom, to reward the competition winner and runners up for their creativity and help encourage their ideas and inventions further. These amazing prizes can be used as part of the recently updated national school curriculum which has replaced ICT with Computer Science, allowing children to use the prizes to build Lego models, connect them to the classroom computer and program them to perform various functions that they can interact with in real life. What an exciting and fun way to introduce programming and Computer Science to young children! Well, the winner of the Young Inventors competition was announced recently and…. drum roll, please…. The winner was one of our own! The most creative young inventor in the country is Jamie Daniel Norris (Year 2) from Saint Pierre School in Leigh-on-Sea. Out of over 250 designs throughout the UK and Ireland. How amazing is that?! Congratulations, Jamie! Jamie Norris’ invention was a Cloud Machine, which allows you to collect clouds from rainy places and put them in dry places – as you can see in his intricately designed blueprints above. And below, you can see Rapid Online have graphically re-designed little Jamie’s Cloud Machine invention beautifully. (Obviously not as good as the original, but a fantastic rendition all the same!) The Four Runner Up Entries: Epilepsy Glasses by Alison Browne from Kildimo National School, Kildimo Life-giving Straw by Max Best from Aysgarth School, Bedale The Slider Table by Lucy Mehta from Ashfold School, Aylesbury Paste Brush by Andrew Mason from Gaelscoil Osraí, Kilkenny