The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation (QEPrize) has only limited time left for young people around the world, aged between 14 and 24, to Create the Trophy for its 2021 awards.
The Create the Trophy competition is hosted on the newly refreshed QEPrize3D app, freely available on both iOS and Android.
The app provides a library of shapes and materials for designers to create a piece of engineering history, and a photo studio helps them further stylise designs before sharing with friends.
This year, to help accommodate different learning styles, users also have the option to submit photo and text explanations alongside their designs. Entrants can choose to make a sketch or model of their trophy and photograph it, or take a photograph of something that inspired their work.
The previous competition to design the trophy for the 2019 QEPrize winners saw an unprecedented number of entries from over 50 countries, with 16-year-old Jack Jiang from Hong Kong crowned the overall winner after his intricate design impressed the judges with its complexity and balance.
Dr Bradford Parkinson, Professor James Spilker, Hugo Fruehauf, and Richard Schwartz won the 2019 Prize for their work on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Jack’s trophy was presented by HRH The Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on 3 December 2019.
The competition closes at 12pm on Monday 21 December 2020, and an expert panel of judges will then begin to assess the submissions. The winner will be announced on 2 February 2021 along with the winners of the 2021 QEPrize.
In addition to seeing their design transformed into the finished trophy for presentation to the winners of the 2021 QEPrize, the winner will receive a state-of-the-art laptop and an invitation to the award ceremony in London, including travel and accommodation.
Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, said: “Engineering is fundamentally a creative discipline. Engineers take quite disparate scientific discoveries and fashion them into innovative solutions which eventually become indispensable to our daily lives. Last year’s prize-winning innovation – GPS – is a prime example. The engineers behind it built upon a set of novel technologies to create a powerful system that now benefits billions of people every day.
“The Create the Trophy competition is a showcase for creativity. It gives young people around the world the opportunity to create innovative designs that represent the profound impact of engineering on humanity.”
Sir Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group and chair of the competition judging panel, said: “Create the Trophy is a wonderful competition which enables young people to express their creativity, design skills and engineering application.
“The QEPrize winners are incredible figures who are respected throughout the world, and to be able to create a lasting award recognising their achievement has proved to be incredibly inspiring to our entrants. I think Create the Trophy is a marvellous opportunity to Introduce young people to the challenges and opportunities of a career in modern engineering.”
For more information on how to enter the competition, click here.
