This week the School of Engineering is hosting a Headstart Summer School sponsored by the United Kingdom Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF). The Headstart Summer School programme provides young students a taste of university life through lectures and labs to prepare them for future study.  UKESF is an organisation with membership from both companies employing electronics graduates and the top UK Universities teaching electronics degrees, and was set up to address the significant shortfall in the number of students graduating with electronics degrees by providing scholarships for university students and experiences for school students such as the Summer School.

During the Summer School students are learning to programme autonomous vehicles, design systems for automatic detection and illumination of moving objects and build an electronic sonar device in practical sessions, and are hearing about biometric identification and invisibility cloaks from an engineering perspective. There are networking sessions to talk to practising engineers and to hear about the employment opportunities for electronics graduates, while the highlight of the week will be an industrial visit to Texas Instruments' (TI) facility in Greenock to see how silicon integrated circuits are made.