Deadline extended until 31 October!
For our centenary year, 2020, we have worked with Essex County Council and Chelmsford City Council to celebrate Essex 2020 – a year of Science and Creativity – with hundreds of events being organised by a range of organisations and people.
This county-wide STEAM festival is putting the creative arts into STEM, and as part of this CSES is running a Centenary Photographic Competition open to primary and secondary students in Essex.
A visual celebration of Science and Engineering in Essex
We want you to take and submit photographs which capture what is unique or special about science and technology from across our amazing county. From the longest pier in the world and the birthplace of radio, to Nobel prize winners, companies that put image sensors into space and much, much more...
A DIY Imagine! STEM competition during lockdown
We are pleased to publish our Imagine! masterclasses for Essex 2020 online.
Go to our resources section to find out more.
Bridge building competition
The CSES Build a Bridge Competition is now closed and we thank all those who made the effort and took the time to submit an entry. With entries across a very wide age range, judging proved to be very difficult, but the quality of effort throughout and ingenuity applied to the challenge by everyone has been beyond our imagination! Well done to all participants.
Due to the COVID-19 situation we will unfortunately be unable to hold the CSES Schools' Competition this year.
If you were thinking of entering, we will gladly allow entries from this year to be presented next year. We'll announce the details once confirmed.
Thank you for your understanding, and the very best wishes for the coming months. Stay safe!
We know that CSES events matter to our members, and that it is especially important to keep our community alive and connected during these unusual times.
We are therefore moving many of our planned events to a virtual setting, and will reschedule the remainder. Our partner organisations are doing the same.
Please keep an eye on the events section for the revised programme. Members who are subscribed to email updates will continue to receive these as usual.
If you have any queries, please do get in touch via the usual channels. All administrative operations continue as normal and the committee is continuing to hold its monthly meetings virtually.
Thank you for your understanding and best wishes for the coming months. Stay safe!
Our hit STEM Club is back with an expanded programme for Essex 2020
Due to the COVID-19 situation, we will unfortunately have to postpone these sessions until the next academic year.
We are very pleased, however, to publish our "Simple Machines and Bridges" masterclass (originally scheduled for May) as a DIY activity pack. See our resources section to find out more.
This is part of Essex 2020 – a Year of Science and Creativity.
Featuring Chris Neale and Alan Pamphilon (CSES and Chelmsford Civic Society)
CSES and Chelmsford Civic Society have recorded a podcast for Essex 2020, part of a series which goes behind the scenes of the UK's biggest celebration of science and creativity. In each episode, Essex 2020 project director Richard Freeman meets some of the brilliant people and organisations who are working to create, inspire and discover Essex's past, present and future.
Read more: Essex 2020 Podcast: Marconi and The Making Of Chelmsford
Essex 2020 is officially launched with address from CSES
At the Essex 2020 launch event, held at Teledyne e2v on 20 January 2020, CSES Vice President Adam Wood talked about 20 surprising and inspiring inventions from Essex.
As well as the big names there are some things that you may not know came from Essex, and we are pleased to promote these in collaboration with Essex 2020 and BBC Essex. The diversity and significance of these, and other, inventions from our county is truly both surprising and inspiring!
Read on to be fascinated by the list of 20 inventions. If you know of any others, please tell us as we are collecting a catalogue of Essex inventions throughout 2020.
Read more: 20 surprising and inspiring inventions from Essex
Essex 2020: A Year of Science and Creativity
CSES celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. To mark the occasion the Society, in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University, bid to host the British Science Festival. We were successful in bringing this international festival to Essex for the first time its 189-year history.
The occasion inspired Essex Partners to launch Essex 2020 – a Year of Science and Creativity to mark this prestigious event.
The British Science Festival has been postponed until next year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however we are pleased to advise that we will be holding many of our Essex 2020 (and regular) events online. The rest are being rescheduled to our next (2020-21) season.
Read on or see our events pages to find out what we've got planned.
Students from the Greensward Academy attended thee 2019 IET Faraday Challenge, supported by the CSES
On 30th January 6 year 8 students attended the Faraday Challenge, run by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Chelmsford, supported by CSES. The students (Isabella Vitney, Noah Garner, Jack Kelley, Austin Bateman, and Charlie Bracken) were given a problem to solve (the details are sworn to secrecy, as this is part of a National Competition) making use of circuits and various construction/engineering materials. They were expected to work as a team; design, create and promote their idea, keep to a budget, and obviously, come up with a solution.

12 students from the Greensward Academy attended the CSES Schools' Competition
On Friday 28th June, 12 Greensward students attended the Chelmsford Science and Engineering Societies’ Annual Schools’ Competition. The event was hosted by Anglia Ruskin University where the students presented the 3 projects they had been working on, either in STEM club, or as part of the Engineering Education Scheme, to a range of judges from the local science and engineering community.

Read more: Greensward Academy at the CSES Schools' Challenge
- More FREE Digital Skills Training – this time by Google
- FREE Digital Skills Training by Facebook
- Welcome to our 2019-2020 season!
- Mentors sought for Teledyne e2v schools' engineering challenge
- Launch report of Imagine!
- Female Students Enrolled in Science Programmes in Steady Increase
- 2019 Competition results
- Essex Record Office Engagement Fellowship
- The Internet: is it Still Good For Us?
- CSES Hosts IET Faraday Challenge 2019