We use cookies to improve your online experiences. To learn more and choose your cookies options, please refer to our cookie policy.
We are pleased to announce our MIT Challenges for the 2024-2025 School year!
The MIT-NAE STEAM Programme is a great opportunity for BSB students to participate in exciting challenges designed by leading MIT professors. MIT provides excellent materials and resources to ensure our students can explore, have fun and be curious about the world around them.
Challenge 1: Design Solutions with AI
16th September – 8th November
The Expert
Prof. Faez Ahmed, ABS Career Development Assistant Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering
The Challenge
Al has the potential to speed up the product design process and help each of us unlock our inner designer. Just like we learn by doing, machine learning looks at past data and predicts the future.
With Al, Professor Ahmed imagines a world where anyone with a great idea can put it into practice and make a real-world impact, regardless of discipline-specific degrees and training.
Professor Ahmed challenges you to channel your inner product designer and consider how you could use Al to improve an existing, product that you use in your daily life.
Challenge 2: Design Solutions for Climate
2nd December – 14th February
The Expert
Prof. Ariel Furst, MIT Chemical Engineering. A cross-disciplinary thinker and expert in biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering, working to understand how industrial byproducts impact the climate and looking for climate solutions in unexpected places!
The Challenge
Our day-to-day actions have consequences we can't always see. Our cars and planes produce exhaust, our lunches come in plastic that ends up in landfills and waterways. These small, daily actions add up to a big impact on our climate!
Professor Furst challenges your students to think across disciplines and look for creative solutions to turn a product or byproduct of climate change into something useful. Design a creative solution to this big problem!
Challenge 3: Design Solutions for Good
3rd March – 25th April 25
The Expert
MIT’s Code for Good is a club created and led entirely by MIT Students! They use their tech skills to help local non profits improve their websites, data tracking, or whatever problem they may be facing that needs a tech solution. This allows the local nonprofits to make a big impact for good, with help from MIT!
The Challenge
In this challenge, students will think about creative ways to remove, reuse, or repurpose these byproducts. All students can learn about the history of the industrial revolution, and how this created new chemical compounds and different pollutants. Maybe biology could help us find a microbe that eats trash. Or chemistry might show us away to turn car exhaust into fuel! Beginning students may learn about industrial byproducts and identify byproducts in their daily lives. Or they might think about how academic disciplines-all the subjects they study in school-overlap and how we can combine those disciplines to better understand a problem. Older students might develop an idea for repurposing an industrial byproduct, and sketch out a plan from designing to prototyping to testing
Our students and teacher also had the opportunity to go to MIT in person to experience learning.
Click to read BSB students at the MIT-Nord Anglia STEAM Trip and BSB Teacher at MIT Professional Development Week.
Year 9 and Year 11 students have begun the options process of selecting their IGCSE and IB Diploma courses for next school year.