Tes Independent School Awards 2020

Outstanding individuals and institutions in the independent education sector have been recognised in the shortlist for the 2020 Tes Independent School Awards and we are absolutely thrilled to announce that a team from Croydon High Junior School have been shortlisted in the ‘Student Initiative of the Year,’ The nomination recognised the achievements of the Year 5 Raspberry Pi team, who call themselves The Ivy Travel Pi-oneers.

Earlier this year, this team of four Year 5 girls were chosen as a finalist in the PA PA PI awards Raspberry Pi Competition 2019. Our amazing girls had designed and developed an interactive voice-activated system for passengers with visual impairment to get real-time bus information and flash a light in the bus stop to notify the driver and request a stop.

As winners they were invited for an awards day and spent the day at CodeNode, which is the UK’s largest venue dedicated to technology events. They spent the day participating in different workshops and presenting their project to important and highly successful professionals from different walks of life.   This was a well-deserved and amazing experience for the team.

Members of staff from TfL also visited the team’s stall on the awards day and were particularly impressed by their project. As a result, they were invited to the TfL office in North Greenwich to present  their project to the technical team there.

Shriya, Beyza , Ava and Palak write…

This was a great opportunity to meet different people; we even got to see the background processes, project management, staff management, and the coding that TfL do for their customers.

We learned how the system works; it is like baking bread where the input is the dough, baking is the process and the output is the bread. Similarly with the TfL systems, the input is the query given by passengers on the journey planner website, the process is when the query is sent to the TfL API and database for answers, and the output is the result on the TfL journey planner website.

While we were presenting our project we noticed that the room was male-dominated. After the presentation the ladies in the room thanked us for taking an interest and told us how great it would be to see more women working in technology. We were also told that, had we been a bit older, we could have applied for the TfL Apprentice Program. It was a proud moment for all of us and we thoroughly enjoyed the experience!

Congratulations and best of luck to the Ivy Travel Pi-oneers with their TES Awards nomination, we are all really proud of you!