Pupils from Dame Alice Owens School in Potters Bar were named the winners of a national coding competition.

The school won in the Sixth Form and college category of PA Consulting’s Raspberry Pi competition, which called for pupils to invent, design and create products using the Raspberry Pi microcomputer.

Entrants to the 2020 competition were asked to design products for the ‘sustainable city of the future’, and their video submissions were judged by a virtual panel. The winner in each category received £1,000 in prize money.

Dame Alice Owens’ pupils designed a handheld air pollution detector which could plot pollution methods hourly on a map to provide information to the public and researchers.

The judges said: “We were really impressed with the way that the team took their concept, purchased low-cost items and came up with a really viable product that can link to mapping technology to show pollution levels.”