Competitions
We hold a range of competitions for students throughout the year, including our flagship annual TEXPO where students from local schools showcase their work and compete for prizes, and other projects and online activities. Find out more and enter here.
Two flagship competitions – enter both if you can!
Big Bang Competition: enter online by 30 March 2023
Get your students thinking about issues they're passionate about or coming up with solutions to challenges they've come across in their own lives by doing a project for The Big Bang Competition.
Taking part in the UK's top STEM competition for young people is a brilliant way to inspire your students to think big and show their passion.
Enter your science or engineering project online by 30 March 2023 at 5pm.
If you don't know where to start, or are looking for project ideas, check out some useful resources, tips and guides.
Or you can build a STEM project in easy step-by-steps with The Big Bang Challenge or browse the Big Bang Project Gallery.
CSES Schools' TEXPO: Fri 30 June 2023, ARU Chelmsford
For Y5-13 | Show your project to scientists and engineers | Cash prizes | Free lunch!
Are you in a STEM club at primary or secondary school? Have you made or investigated something fantastic in technology or science lessons? Have you been doing interesting technical projects at home?
Are you a teacher who'd like to showcase your pupils' / students' work? Or are you a parent, guardian or tutor whose child has been working on an exciting project?
If your answer to any of these questions is YES, then exhibit at the annual CSES TEXPO. There is prize money to be won and we even provide lunch!
We welcome projects from all STE(A)M disciplines. You don't need to do any additional work: bring your project(s) as they are. This could be something you've made, software, experiments, reports, posters, videos, presentations etc. You can enter the same project to TEXPO and Big Bang, including projects originally from other competitions.
Click here to find out more | Click here to enter your project(s)
TEXPO Schools' Competition: Fri 30 June 2023, Anglia Ruskin University
We are pleased to confirm the date for the 2023 CSES Schools' Technology Exhibition (TEXPO).
The dates will be as follows:
- The TEXPO will take place on Friday 30 June 2023.
- The awards evening will take place on one evening of Tuesday 18 July 2023.
Find out more about the competition, and how to enter, here.
We will announce when the TEXPO is open for entries in the coming weeks, and look forward to seeing you in June!
Taking a camera or your phone and shooting a picture is an easy. But how about, when composing your image, you think about how your picture might be used to discover some aspect of science and engineering?
From a flower to a rainbow, from a bubble to a radio mast, from smoke to light, from microscopy to astronomy, everywhere in our modern world we face science and engineering wonders that make our lives easier, more fun and more interesting. This is the fourth year of our competition and we have had some outstanding winners in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Art meets Science – Our annual photographic competition this year aims at creating an opportunity for you to creatively express, in pictures, what you observe within science. We hope that this will get you exploring the visual aspects of STEAM through the art and science of photography, and capturing images that demonstrate and communicate STEAM concepts and phenomena.
This year, with our Giving Voice schools' project, the focus is on the many facets of:
Electronic Communication
(Including everything old and new, from radio to TV to computers and mobile phones, records, CDs, microwaves, IR sensors, Wi-Fi and more!)
We want you to take photographs (up to 3 entries) that express what electronic communication means to you, or how it impacts health and environment (for better or worse). Each photograph should be accompanied with a short plain-language explanation (not more than 50 words) of the science and thoughts behind it.
Read more: Centenary Photographic Competition 2023: Electronic Communication
From passion to project
Get your students thinking about issues they're passionate about or developing solutions to challenges they've come across in their own lives by doing a project for The Big Bang Competition.
Taking part in the UK's top STEM competition for young people is a brilliant way to inspire your students to think big and show their passion.
Enter your science or engineering project online by 30 March 2023 at 5pm.
Images on the theme of "Controlling the Climate Crisis"
Thank you to everyone who entered our 2022 Photographic Competition on the theme of Controlling the Climate Crisis. We were delighted to receive yet again an impressive selection of thoughtful, powerful, clever and sometimes funny images that speak to this important topic.
You can see all of the photographs at our web gallery here.
Congratulations to our winners, whose entries are shown below. Since quite a few of the entries (unfortunately) didn't meet the technical criteria or appeared to be copied from stock images, we have awarded a first prize (£60) and four highly commended prizes (£20), across the age categories. We look forward to running another competition next year.
After two years off due to Covid, the annual CSES Schools' Competition returned on 17 June 2022, now known by its new name "TEXPO" (Schools' Technology Exhibition) as it accompanies our new online competitions and projects.
Numbers were understandably lower this year, but the standard of work on display was incredibly high. Entries were especially impressive given the limitations that we know people have faced over the last couple of years during the pandemic.
- 2022 TEXPO results
- TEXPO 2022 and Photo Competition – ONE WEEK left to enter!
- Big Bang 2022 deadline extended
- Call for entries: TEXPO 2022 and Big Bang
- Save the date: Schools' TEXPO 2022
- Centenary Photographic Competition 2022: Controlling the Climate Crisis
- Photographic Competition 2021 winners announced
- Photographic Competition 2021 Deadline Extended
- Centenary Photographic Competition 2021
- Spring 2021 Imagine! STEAM Competition winners announced