The minister presenting medals to the winners
The Kumasi Academy Senior High School last Friday scored 24.6 points to beat Pope John Senior High and Seminary and the Worawora Senior High School to win the maiden edition of the STEMNNOVATION contest.
For emerging winner, Kumasi Academy SHS took home a trophy, laptop, printer and GH¢12,000 cash prize.
Pope John Senior High and Worawora Senior High scored 24.4 and 23.8 points to place 1st and 2nd runner-up respectively.
Pope John Senior High and Seminary was presented with a plaque, laptop, printer and GH¢7,000 cash while Worawora SHS took home a plaque, laptop, printer and GH¢5,000 cash.
Awards were also presented to 16 others as regional champions, overall best recycling project, overall best coding and programming project and overall best solar project.
Other awards went to the most popular project, overall best TVET school, most artistic STEMNNOVATION award and best STEMNNOVATION award among others.
The Education Minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, speaking during the prize presentation ceremony at the University of Ghana was very excited that efforts being made by the government in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in schools across the country were yielding good results.
He was particularly happy that the competing schools came from across the entire country, and that indicated that STEM education was catching up with all schools irrespective of location, grade and resource availability in a particular school.
The Education Minister eulogised the Free Senior School Secretariat (FSHS) for introducing the competition.
The project that helped the Kumasi Academy SHS to win the contest was “Building a smart home using local materials and Arduino”, the Pope John SHS and Seminary had a project on “Corn cob water filtration system” while that of Worawora SHS focused on “lighting and charging system” using solar.
There was a two-day exhibition of the various projects by the contesting institutions.
All the participating schools who were from Senior High, Senior High/Technical Schools as well as Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions apart from exhibiting their projects also made oral presentations justifying the processes, authenticity and economic importance of the projects towards resolving challenges in their communities and the nation as a whole.
A total of 200 schools submitted videos of their projects meant for the contest but only 97 of the schools qualified after going through vetting by the team of experts put together for that purpose.
The event, which was launched on September 5, 2022 and started on October 2022 has been held virtually since its commencement, but the grand finale brought the contestants face-to-face with the judges for the first time.
In charge of the contest were six local judges and six international judges who have been painstakingly analysing the authenticity of the innovations of the contestants before scoring them.