CREST Awards are organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in order encourage young people to get involved in "stretching extra-curricular research projects". There are three levels of award, Bronze, Silver and Gold, each level requiring increasing amount of work and sophistication, and covering the age range from 11 to 19.
I have been involve over several years in mentoring teams of yr 10/11 girls aiming for Silver CREST, helping about 100 to get awards. Each student should expect to do about 30 hours of independent work for a Siver award. They require a fair degree of commitment. (Gold awards require at least 70 hours of work and involve significantly more challenge – often real research. I have known high ability yr 11 teams with exceptional commitment successfully tackling Gold projects, but these are normally more suitable for yr 12/13 who have previously done a Silver and know what might be involved.)
See also this page for some more detailed resources.
A carefully chosen project needs, in my opinion, to have the following characteristics:
- It should have some relationship to their academic studies. (Ideally, the students will need to find out how the science, technology or maths they study is applied in a real World situation, and/or they will need to read beyond the syllabus to find the knowledge they need.)
- The project should engage their imagination and motivate them, either because of the gee-whiz nature of the science, or the obvious relevance of the outcome to important contemporary problems.
- The project should require sufficient work that it is impossible for any one person to complete it on their own. They should find that they have to work as part of a small team, learning how to divide and coordinate their work. (In my experience you need 3 to 5 members, with 4 being ideal. However, it is not unknown for one team member to drop out, so it is often a good idea to start teams with a minimum of 4 members. If you have six or more in a team you may find that one student either coasts along without pulling their weight - or simply cannot find a way to effectively contribute because the more enthusiastic team members find it easier to take on all the work rather than trying to involve everyone.)
- It should have real challenge: it does no harm if in the early stages the teams realise that they have taken on something that they do not know how to complete. (It is the mentor's job to provide suggestions at critical points, keeping them moving in the right direction, without telling them how to solve the problem.) In most cases the miracle happens: a disorganised and floundering bunch of students find a way of working together and sorting out what they need to do. When they reach they end of the process, they then have a terrific sense of achievement and it is extremely rewarding for the mentor to see how much they have developed during the course of the project.
- The problem should be open-ended in the sense that there are a number of possible solutions. None should be considered the "right" solution. Part of the challenge is for the team to argue that their solution meets the original specification.
- Although there is no right solution, proposals must respect known science and engineering practicality. Some teams produce excellent projects based on interesting applications of of-the-shelf component. We should, however, also encourage “blue-sky” thinking, for example, based on assumptions that cutting-edge technology now being tried in university labs will turn out to work as hoped. (“Soft robotics” is a good example. In the past we have found that “off-the-wall” ideas from some students are turning into reality three or four years later.)
- Although it would be highly desirable for project to have a practical aspect, this can cause difficulties with access to resources, especially if more than one or two teams at a time wish to take part. (Grants to fund equipment are available from time to time from professional societies, and some companies may be prepared to sponsor teams. However, this does take significant administrative effort from busy teaching staff.) We have found that it is possible to specify challenging paper-based design exercises, allowing groups of up to 40 students (8-10 teams) to work in parallel. Note that this is really very similar to industrial practice, where a number of alternative solutions to a problem are scoped and assessed on paper by different teams. We point this out to students.
Effective support by a mentor external to the school is valuable. It is essential at Gold level (to deal with technical challenges), and highly desirable for Silver projects. An industrial mentor brings attitudes, insights, suggestions and knowledge not available to teachers. I am now retired, so I am no longer an employed industrial engineer. (However, I do not think that my insights and knowledge will decay immediately.)