EW BrightSparks 2023: Kate Lucas – Cambridge University

Now in its sixth year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2023, we highlight Kate Lucas, an engineering student at Cambridge University.

Achievements

Kate has been Co-President of the Cambridge University Robotics (CUR) Society, whose aim is ‘to make robotics accessible for all’. They were recently announced as the winners of the Engineering Society of the Year Category at the Engineering Talent Awards, which the judges attributed to its outreach work, which Kate has been responsible for organising and driving forwards.

The society also runs a range of different projects, from the introductory Minibots programme for freshers, to more complex projects such as InMoov, a humanoid robotics project which Kate has worked on, as well as FightFest, Rescue and Research. She also secured funding from a range of sources, and organised talks with industry and some social events.

One of her biggest achievements over the past year, she shared, has been planning and organising the Unibots UK 2023 competition.

In March last year Cambridge hosted Unibots UK 2023 at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. After many months of planning, Kate helped grow the competition from four to 12 teams building robots, from five different universities.

The society’s big aim with Unibots UK is to create a competition for people who really want to get involved with robotics but who don’t yet have a lot of experience.

As the main organiser of the event, kate was responsible for the smooth running of all aspects, she told us – from working with sponsors to ordering T-shirts and building the arenas!

It was her first time organising such a large event and at times it was quite stressful, she admitted, but Kate says she is really proud of how it went and she is looking for ways to make it even bigger and better this year.

Another of Kate’s achievements was running Sparkbots, which is a day-long robotics workshop.

She secured funding, designed activities, built kits and recruited fellow students to help run a day-long robotics workshop at a school with no Design & Technology department. The young people went from no knowledge of electronics to having built their own robots with Arduino, including learning how to use servos, ultrasonic sensors and breadboards. All of the students said they enjoyed the day, and 85% responded that they would like to learn more about robotics if given the opportunity.

Building on the success of this event, Kate successfully bid in a Dragon’s Den style pitch for increased funding from the Engineering Department’s SPIP (Student-led Projects and Industry Partnership) fund to run further outreach events.

Over the next year, she told us, Kate is hoping to run more events in schools as well as a microbit hackathon with university students, to generate ideas and tutorials to inspire young people (as microbits will be distributed to primary schools across the UK for free this year).

Also, last summer, she undertook a four-week internship at Kitronik, a company that makes kits for educators and hobbyists. Her project was focused on designing a low-cost but robust robot arm for use in schools, to teach programming with Microbit.

“I feel my skills in Fusion360 have come on leaps and bounds, I have learned about the key motors and electronics involved with robot arms, and developed my rapid prototyping skills,” Kate told us.

Finally, Kate has also been awarded undergraduate scholarships by the IET, IMechE, and IGEM, as well as receiving the Engineering Leaders Scholarship from the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of her potential as a future leader in engineering.

She has also received the Student Representation Award from her college (Homerton) two years in a row for her activities with Cambridge University Robotics.

Electronics Industry Viewpoint
Karen Holland, CEO of XCAM, also shared her viewpoint on Kate’s entry.

“I found it difficult to understand how Kate could fit in so much, alongside studying for an engineering degree at Cambridge,” Karen told us. “So much of what she does alongside her degree seems to be directed at either educating or mentoring others and it really stands out how important these roles are to her. ”

“She is not only clearly technically competent but has a very wide range of skills encompassing bidding for/securing funding, designing learning activities, managing procurement of parts to build kits as well as running the events. She is clearly going to go far in her career with these wide-ranging skills alongside a high degree of technical competence.”

Community

Kate has also consistently involved himself in STEM outreach.

She has been involved in a wide range of other community engagement activities and am currently registered as a STEM ambassador.

For example, over the course of a year she has been a mentor on a platform called Zero Gravity. This connects university students with sixth formers from disadvantaged backgrounds who are looking for support in their application process. For 2022/23 she had two mentees with whom I had weekly calls, and she now has one mentee for the year 2023/24, all of whom are applying to study engineering.

In addition she has been involved with other mentoring: reading many personal statements, giving mock interviews and general advice on applying to study engineering.

Kate is also a mentor on the Apply Cambridge Programme, which is a paid part time role targeted at sixth formers from disadvantaged backgrounds. She has six mentees whom she messages every few days, and they have monthly group calls to discuss their progress.

She also been involved with outreach work for my college, Homerton. This includes compiling lists of resources for the engineering applicant page on the website, and giving online talks to prospective applicants as well as in-person talks with offer holders.

There is also the London Youth Robotics Conference. Kate gave a talk at the one day conference for secondary school students, which was hosted at St Paul’s Girls School. Her talk explored InMoov, the humanoid robot, prosthetic limbs, and how to get started with electronics.

Kate also represented the CUR society at the Cambridge University Open Day, talking to prospective students about the society as well as what it is like to study at Cambridge more generally.

She has also supported the First Lego League volunteering initiative. This involved a “Gadgeteers summer reading challenge” – the theme of the 2022 summer reading challenge in UK libraries was ‘gadgeteers’ and centred around technology and making things.

Kate ran workshops in local libraries, in Waltham Forest, with primary school-aged children using kits she had designed. They made their own ‘robot hand’ with string and card, and got to play with some robots she had made for demonstration purposes.

You can also view IMechE Day in the Life of a Cambridge Engineering Student (at a young persons’ robotics day ‘Design a Robot’) here.