‘Music teacher in an app’ wins Young Engineer award

Grace Lord, Aalia Sellar and Brendan Miralles, all aged 14, created an app called ‘Music Splash’, which uses machine learning to analyse music performance and provides feedback to help you improve and work towards grading. The students say it “guides you to instant perfection and is like a music teacher in an app”.

The Loughborough team competed against more than 500 finalists from across the country who were selected to present their ideas at the Big Bang Fair at the NEC on 14 March, 2019.

Ten entries were shortlisted to pitch Dragon’s Den-style to a panel of VIP judges, including Andrew Smyth, a Rolls-Royce aerospace engineer and former Great British Bake-Off contestant, Dr Ozak Esu, IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year 2017, and Roma Agrawal, structural engineer on The Shard, STEM promoter and TV presenter.

Other winners include 15-year-old Maeve Stillman from St Mary’s College in Derry who was named GSK UK Young Scientist of the Year for her project “Investigating the Effect of Activated Charcoal on the Absorptions of Medications”, and a team from Dalziel High School whose project ‘Pi-Box’ - a cloud data storage that streams live telemetry data from an aircraft to the cloud, enabling real-time analysis of aircraft data - won the BAE Systems Advancement in Technology award.

On winning GSK UK Young Engineers of the Year, the Loughborough students said: “We know there are hundreds of students that apply for this and so to win is just a dream come true… Our goal for the future is to get our app on the app store so watch this space.”

The Big Bang Competition is an annual contest designed to recognise and reward young people's achievements in all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), as well as helping them build skills and confidence in project-based work.

The team will receive £2,000 in prize money and will have the opportunity to carry out work experience at some of the UK’s leading engineering firms.