Pupils have submitted an ambitious project for school-science competition the Bright Spark Awards.

The Space Quest team from Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham cooperated with the European Space Agency’s Asgard Committee on an ongoing project researching the impact of global warming.

The pupils sent a weather balloon high into the atmosphere to measure atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas CO2.

The high-tech project used a number of sensors to measure heat, humidity and CO2, as well as surveillance equipment including an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for assessing the balloon’s movement provided by the Institute for Research in Schools.

Pupil Bryn Scholefield explained: “Our experiment’s composed of four Arduino-based sensors, two heat and humidity sensors and two CO2 sensors.

“One of each type of sensor was placed on a gondolier, which was in turn attached to a stratospheric weather balloon provided by the Asgard committee.”

The Bright Spark Awards are open to primary and secondary schools across the south-east, and encourage teams of pupils to use cross-curricular skills in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects in practical projects.

The winners will be announced at a Dragons’ Den-style awards ceremony at Discovery Park in Sandwich next month.

There is a cash prize of £500 for the overall winners.

Besides Discovery Park, the other judges are BAE Systems, Atkins Global, Megger, the ITL Group, EduKit, Highways England, Pfizer, Kent Renewable Energy and Golding Vision.

See www.kmcharityteam.co.uk/schools/brightspark.

And watch a video about the Space Quest project here: