Students from Helston Community College have enjoyed showing off their skills lately, as they entered a series of competitions and proved themselves to be amongst the best.

On June 21, a group of year nine, ten and 13 students from the college attended The Big Bang Fair South West at the University of Exeter, which is a regional version of the national science event.

Besides meeting and interacting with many companies and organisations involved in science, technology, engineering, and maths, the students also presented their project investigating the effect of food additives on signalling in nerves.

By the end of the day the students had won the digital award for best use of technology, the South West Young Scientist of the Year award, and qualified to take part in the national competition at the NEC next year.

At the event, the students faced stiff competition from 30 other projects, but by qualifying their project has been shown to be amongst the top 200 in the country.

Students from the college have also been involved in the Bloodhound ‘Race for the Line’ project, which saw them designing their own rocket cars.

They were then raced using model rocket engines, with the fastest team deemed the winners, and the college entered four teams into the regional finals.

Three of those teams achieved first, second and fourth place in the secondary school category, which resulted in the team being invited to the national finals at Santa Pod raceway.

The top prize was a trip to South Africa to see the real Bloodhound Supersonic Car put through its paces.

Earlier in the year, six of students from the college visited Humphry Davy School to compete in the National IET/Faraday STEM Challenge.

The brief was to design and make a product, to improve crew or boat performance on GB's America's Cup Challenge - Land Rover BAR.

Land Rover BAR is the British America’s Cup team led by 4-times Olympic gold medalist, Sir Ben Ainslie. The students used coding to program a BBC Microbit to monitor stress on the mast, and a training aid for the crew.

The team scored 95/100, not only winning the event, but also achieving the second highest score in the country.

The students will shortly be travelling up to Portsmouth to compete in the IET Faraday Challenge Days National Final on July 12 at the Land Rover BAR base in Portsmouth.