The Nuffield Foundation is a charitable trust designed to improve social well-being by funding research and innovation in education and social policy. The Foundation annually runs research placements, providing over 1,000 Further Education students in the UK with the opportunity to work alongside professional scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.

Working alongside UCMK Associate Dean, Dr Paul Sant, and the University of Bedfordshire's head of the Centre for Wireless Research, Professor Ben Allen, the two budding computer scientists, Kai Chance and Max Calle, have been finding out how computer technology can be utilised to operate electronic systems that affect everyday life.

Kai has developed a traffic monitoring system using motion sensors, where the traffic lights change depending on the level of traffic travelling from each direction – as opposed to the timed version commonly used in current lights in operation on the roads.

Max's project has seen the 17-year-old configure a solar powered Raspberry PI to pick up signals from the miniature from a FUNcube1 satellite, which is an amateur satellite concept – designed to educate youngsters about radio, space, physics and electronics.

Dr Sant said: "I am delighted that the University of Bedfordshire's UCMK campus has been able to host Kai and Max, and supply them with the practical experience they'll be able to use during their A Level studies and beyond.

"The opportunity for Kai and Max to have access to Raspberry PI computers, which are used in a wide range of electronics projects and powers computer desktop programmes such as word-processing, is really important for their development, as young people all over the world are starting to learn programming and electronic engineering concepts via this method.

"Over the space of four weeks, both have made fantastic progress in learning about the data that is needed to make electronics systems functional, and then putting that theory into practice."

Kai added: "I really want to study Computer Science at university, and undertaking a placement such as the Nuffield scheme at UCMK will help me stand out against other applicants.

"As well as finding the traffic monitoring system really interesting to work on, it was also good to hear from Dr Sant about the importance of logging your progress in written and data form."