Image: Numero winners

A student company from St John Fisher Catholic College has been named Staffordshire Young Enterprise Company of the Year 2017/18, after working with Keele University’s School of Pharmacy to develop an app that aids student learning in mathematics.

The student company - Numero - also gained prizes for ‘best innovation’ and ‘best interview’ at the awards ceremony held earlier this month. The team of 18 students will now go onto the next round of the competition for the West Midlands on 13th June, and if successful there will progress to the national level in London in early July.

Judges from Wedgwood, Michelin and other leading Staffordshire business were particularly impressed with the partnership that has been formed between Numero and Keele’s School of Pharmacy.

The sixth-form students worked with the University to develop an app to provide a mathematics teaching platform for their students and parents to use. Using technology originally developed to help pharmacy students with their undergraduate studies, the Numero app uses augmented reality to support student learning.

Image: the Numero augmented reality app in action

Luke Bracegirdle, Head of Digital and Business Analytics at Keele’s School of Pharmacy, worked on the design and development of the app with the students. Mr Bracegirdle explained:

“We were approached by the students to help them develop an augmented reality app, after they were inspired by the PharmaCARDs we use at Keele for teaching and learning in our pharmacy programmes. We ran a series of design workshops at Keele as part of our outreach events, and provided the app development skills and use of our technology, whilst the students came up with branding, the content of the app and questions, as well as how it would function as a revision tool.

“We’ve worked closely with the team to create the bespoke Numero app, and I’m really pleased to see them win the Staffordshire Young Enterprise award.”

Rob Schauer, Lead Teacher – Wider Curriculum at St John Fisher Catholic College commented:

“I am incredibly proud of our student company Numero, and would like to thank the School of Pharmacy at Keele for all of the excellent support and guidance they have provided to our students to help us achieve this award. We look forward to working with them on the next stage of the Young Enterprise project.”