Teachers' Notes  |  Prizes  |   Ideas and Inspiration  |  FAQs and how to enter  | 

Your challenge - design a technology innovation harnessing the power of plants

Prizes of £200 / £100 for students, and £100 for your schools

Moss-powered tables that charge your phone…  Glowing trees that could light our streets ….  Plants that detect bomb threats…

See the winners of the 2014 PlantPowerED competition

Plants have amazing powers to transform energy and to change their environments. Now a new generation of designers and scientists are imagining hybrids of technology and plant science that could use these powers to improve our lives and protect our planet.

Think about some of the challenges in everyday life – everything from flooded towns to charging up a smartphone in a desert - and create an idea for an invention that could tackle them.  Your idea must harness the power of both plants and technology.

You don’t necessarily have to produce an invention that would work with the materials we have available in 2014  – this competition is about designing the bio-engineering ideas of the future. So let your imagination soar!

Your entry should show how your device or invention would look, and tell us about how it might work. We've got ideas and inspiration to get you started. 

The questions you should answer include the following: what problems does it solve? What aspects of plant biology does it use? What is the technology behind it? What makes a plant-powered device better than the current version? What challenges would the creators of your device face?  Creativity and scientific thinking are equally important to the judges.

To enter the challenge, explain your ideas to us in writing, together with images or video to introduce how your invention would look. Prizes of £200, £100, £50 and £25 are waiting for our winners!