CREST Awards are organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in order encourage young people to get involved in "stretching extra-curricular research projects". There are three levels of award, Bronze, Silver and Gold, each level requiring increasing amount of work and sophistication, and covering the age range from 11 to 19.
I have been involve over several years in mentoring teams of yr 10/11 girls aiming for Silver CREST, helping about 100 to get awards. Each student should expect to do about 30 hours of independent work for a Siver award. They require a fair degree of commitment. (Gold awards require at least 70 hours of work and involve significantly more challenge – often real research. I have known high ability yr 11 teams with exceptional commitment successfully tackling Gold projects, but these are normally more suitable for yr 12/13 who have previously done a Silver and know what might be involved.)
See also this page for some more detailed resources.
A carefully chosen project needs, in my opinion, to have the following characteristics:
- It should have some relationship to their academic studies. (Ideally, the students will need to find out how the science, technology or maths they study is applied in a real World situation, and/or they will need to read beyond the syllabus to find the knowledge they need.)
- The project should engage their imagination and motivate them, either because of the gee-whiz nature of the science, or the obvious relevance of the outcome to important contemporary problems.
- The project should require sufficient work that it is impossible for any one person to complete it on their own. They should find that they have to work as part of a small team, learning how to divide and coordinate their work. (In my experience you need 3 to 5 members, with 4 being ideal. However, it is not unknown for one team member to drop out, so it is often a good idea to start teams with a minimum of 4 members. If you have six or more in a team you may find that one student either coasts along without pulling their weight - or simply cannot find a way to effectively contribute because the more enthusiastic team members find it easier to take on all the work rather than trying to involve everyone.)
- It should have real challenge: it does no harm if in the early stages the teams realise that they have taken on something that they do not know how to complete. (It is the mentor's job to provide suggestions at critical points, keeping them moving in the right direction, without telling them how to solve the problem.) In most cases the miracle happens: a disorganised and floundering bunch of students find a way of working together and sorting out what they need to do. When they reach they end of the process, they then have a terrific sense of achievement and it is extremely rewarding for the mentor to see how much they have developed during the course of the project.
- The problem should be open-ended in the sense that there are a number of possible solutions. None should be considered the "right" solution. Part of the challenge is for the team to argue that their solution meets the original specification.
- Although there is no right solution, proposals must respect known science and engineering practicality. Some teams produce excellent projects based on interesting applications of of-the-shelf component. We should, however, also encourage “blue-sky” thinking, for example, based on assumptions that cutting-edge technology now being tried in university labs will turn out to work as hoped. (“Soft robotics” is a good example. In the past we have found that “off-the-wall” ideas from some students are turning into reality three or four years later.)
- Although it would be highly desirable for project to have a practical aspect, this can cause difficulties with access to resources, especially if more than one or two teams at a time wish to take part. (Grants to fund equipment are available from time to time from professional societies, and some companies may be prepared to sponsor teams. However, this does take significant administrative effort from busy teaching staff.) We have found that it is possible to specify challenging paper-based design exercises, allowing groups of up to 40 students (8-10 teams) to work in parallel. Note that this is really very similar to industrial practice, where a number of alternative solutions to a problem are scoped and assessed on paper by different teams. We point this out to students.
Effective support by a mentor external to the school is valuable. It is essential at Gold level (to deal with technical challenges), and highly desirable for Silver projects. An industrial mentor brings attitudes, insights, suggestions and knowledge not available to teachers. I am now retired, so I am no longer an employed industrial engineer. (However, I do not think that my insights and knowledge will decay immediately.)
In the Silver projects I have mentored (usually in cooperation with other industrial colleagues) we made several visits:
- An initial project brief - 30 minutes to 1 hour. I also provide a written project specification. I also provide a short written guide on "How to Do a CREST Project" (which is just guidance that I would also give to young professional colleagues running small industrial projects). A copy is on this web-site. By the end of the project most teams admit that they would have saved themselves grief if they had read it more carefully - part of the learning experience!
- The project runs over several months. (The school with which I cooperate starts the project in April/May of yr 10 and schedules the assessment for the October of yr 11. This includes time over the summer vacation for independent research, and ensures that everything is complete by the time "mock" GCSEs start to figure on the horizon.)
- During term-time, the teacher in charge runs weekly lunchtime sessions which ensure that each group meets to discuss progress, and where those who are not progressing can be given a "push".
- The mentors visit once before the start of the summer vacation and once a few weeks after the start of the new academic year - say late September - meeting with each team separately for about 20-30 minutes.
- The mentors should also be prepared to answer questions from the teams forwarded by email (via the responsible teacher).
- There is scope for using Skype to facilitate mentoring
- Mentors with a day-job often have pressing work commitments and they may not always be able to make themselves available at the right time. Hence, if the school is cooperating with an industrial organisation, it is best if two or three people form the mentoring team to spread the load and give a good chance that someone can be available when required.
- When mentoring girls it is of course very useful to have a female role model on the team. However, given the shortage of women in STEM employment, this can be difficult to arrange.
- The mentors should if possible comment on draft reports and attend the final assessment presentations by the teams.
It is also, of course, extremely valuable if a mentor can participate in weekly after-school or lunchtime engineering/science clubs. This is, however, usually difficult for scientists and engineers in full-time employment, even - as I know - when the relevant employer is highly supportive of STEM activities. The logistics and timing tabling around the demands of the day-job is generally just too difficult.
Example Projects
While working for EDF Energy (I am now retired) I helped to developed (with other EDF Energy STEM Ambassadors) two challenges that provide good opportunities for teams to extend their GCSE learning and discover the excitement of engineering based on science. I can think of many other projects that would work just as well. These, however, provided a connection to real problems of the type that employees in the nuclear industry face from time to time. I now concentrate on astrophysics projects. More details are on the Resources page.
Debris Recovery from a Nuclear Reactor
Locate, characterise, pick-up and bring out the suspected debris (all without causing any further damage to the reactor).
Design a method of recovering an irregularly shaped object from the bottom of a nuclear reactor. Access is difficult, through a restricted channel with bends. The environment is hostile (fatal to people and challenging even for electronics). Furthermore, certain materials often used when building robots cannot be taken inside a nuclear reactor.
Students will need to investigate the effects of radioactivity on people and electronics, and how robots can be designed to navigate in difficult confined space, pick-up awkward shapes and survive hostile environment. They might wish to research soft-robotics and bio-mimetics for novel solution approaches.
Extended Human Senses for Working in Dangerous Zones
In parts of the Russia there are old submarine naval bases that are now contaminated with radioactivity and hazardous chemical pollution. They need to be cleaned up – but how are the people who enter such zone to know where there is danger, and where they may walk safely? Can we use devices such as flying drones and autonomous robots to map danger and feed this information to humans in a “live” view using modern technology such as VR head-sets.