Mayfield School girls engineer a sustainable future

Three Sixth Form girls from Mayfield have won a national engineering accolade for their plan to reduce carbon emissions and make Mayfield village more sustainable, placing second out of 140 schools from across the UK in this year’s ICE CityZen Competition.

Budding engineers Megan, Elizabeth and Isabella wanted to come up with a solution to tackle the problem of rising energy costs for the residents, local businesses, and their school in Mayfield. The challenge they faced was how to reduce the energy costs required to heat the historic school and local buildings – many of which are listed - whilst at the same time cutting carbon emissions. The solution? Using geothermal energy, which is renewable, in the form of ground source heat pumps, providing an innovative and non-invasive solution to the problem. The girls’ proposal involved pumps being installed, with excess energy sold to local residents and businesses, improving the sustainability of the village in the process.

CityZen is a UK-wide competition in which student teams learn about civil engineering through completing virtual game challenges. They then take the lessons they’ve learned and apply them to their own civil engineering proposal and submit a video entry explaining their idea.

Lower Sixth pupil Elizabeth commented: “Taking part in the ICE CityZen competition was an incredible experience. I was able to gain invaluable skills throughout the competition process as we problem-solved to find solutions to meet the needs of our local community. I am extremely proud of our achievements, and it was a great honour to go to the ICE headquarters in London last week, where I realised the importance that civil engineers have in shaping our future."

Mayfield’s Head of Physics, Dr Darragh Corvan, said: “We are delighted that Megan, Elizabeth and Isabella have been recognised for their innovative project proposal. At Mayfield, we encourage all our students to pursue their passions and we actively encourage girls to study STEM subjects and pursue careers in engineering, which have traditionally been male dominated. We aim to break the stereotype by providing a range of activities and projects to support the girls’ learning within an environment in which it’s encouraged to experiment and make mistakes, in order to learn and progress. We congratulate the girls on their achievement.”