Students from around Slough rose to the challenge of building robots and designing towers as a global engineering company hosted its latest We Love STEM day at its offices in the town.

More than 30 pupils aged 11 to 12 from three schools around Berkshire and Buckinghamshire took part, spending a day alongside Emerson employees and competing in fun, hands-on activities at the company’s facility in Edinburgh Avenue.

The company hosted the day as a way to help develop young people’s interest in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

During their day with Emerson, students from The Westgate School, Slough, and The Beaconsfield School and Bourne End Academy, both Buckinghamshire, each tackled a STEM tech challenge to build a robot, helping them to learn about machine autonomous problem-solving and how to interpret and follow technical documents.

The pupils also took on a STEM engineering design challenge to create a tower capable of supporting balls of varying sizes, testing their ability to work through the entire cycle of designing, building and testing a prototype.

Emerson’s engineering project manager, Adrianna Niedzwiecka, who organised the event, said: “It was our pleasure to welcome so many enthusiastic students from our local schools, and we hope they have been inspired by what they learned in spending the day with us.

“STEM subjects are often perceived as being difficult, but we wanted to show that there’s plenty of scope to have fun with them too.”