Sixty secondary pupils will attend the Brightest Watts Summer Week at Heriot-Watt University this week, to explore the future opportunities of a career in science, engineering, technology, design or business management.
The emphasis is on fun and practical tasks that underpin the role and importance of these subjects across a wide variety of career and research areas. The fifth year pupils, who have all volunteered to attend the Brightest Watts week during their summer holiday, are drawn from schools across Edinburgh, the Lothians, Forth Valley, Borders and Fife.
Across the week they will attend workshops such as civil engineering, where they will build and test (to destruction!) beams to show how careful design can help to improve load carrying capacity; or make ice cream as part of a physics workshop.
Education Liaison Officer Clare MacGregor, said the summer week was able to provide access to students from such a broad region largely due to continued sponsorship from investment management partnership Baillie Gifford, who has recently agreed to fund the summer week for the next three years.
She said, "Brightest Watts provides a week of focused events across Heriot-Watt University's key schools but it also allows secondary students to get a feel for higher education. As they explore our Edinburgh campus they also learn about student life, and how to balance work, study and play.
"The atmosphere is friendly and supportive and the emphasis is on meeting new people, trying something new, learning new skills and boosting pupils' confidence. Brightest Watts is entering its third year and it keeps developing. Last year we added workshops on British Sign Language and fashion design, and these have proven to be extremely popular.
"Brightest Watts takes students in different directions, demonstrates the myriad of ways to pursue academic interests and sparks interest that we hope will lead these students on to university and fulfilling careers."
Brightest Watts Summer Week runs from Monday July 15 to Friday 19 July.