STEM Workshops in Colchester & North Essex

Colchester is Britain's oldest recorded town, named by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder around AD 77 and built as Camulodunum, the first Roman colonia and the first capital of Roman Britain before Boudica's revolt of AD 61. The town also gave science one of its founding figures: William Gilbert was born here in 1544. His 1600 treatise De Magnete was among the first works of modern experimental physics, establishing that the Earth itself behaves as a giant magnet and coining the term 'electricus', the root of the word electricity. Colchester has been a garrison town for more than 230 years and today hosts 16 Air Assault Brigade, the British Army's rapid-response force, a long thread of engineering and logistics running alongside its ancient past. In 2022 the town was granted city status as part of the Platinum Jubilee honours, making Britain's oldest recorded settlement one of its newest cities.

William Gilbert (1544 to 1603), born in Colchester, served as physician to Elizabeth I and wrote De Magnete, the first systematic study of magnetism and static electricity and a model of evidence-led science that Galileo praised. At the University of Essex's School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, researchers work in one of the UK's largest robotics and mechatronics laboratories, building autonomous systems that include robotic fish. The same department, through researchers including Professor Reinhold Scherer, has made the university a recognised centre for brain-computer interfaces, decoding signals from the brain to control machines.

The University of Essex's Colchester campus at Wivenhoe Park is the region's research anchor, and its School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering is organised around robotics and embedded systems, computational intelligence and artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interfaces and neural engineering. Its Robotics and Mechatronics Laboratory, one of the largest such facilities in the UK, works with wheeled and flying robots and robotic fish. Next to the campus, the Knowledge Gateway research and technology park is home to an Innovation Centre housing more than 40 companies, alongside the Parkside Office Village.

The University of Essex offers degree routes including BSc Artificial Intelligence and MSc Intelligent Systems and Robotics. The Knowledge Gateway and Innovation Centre give graduates local employers close to campus, while the garrison and wider Essex economy sustain demand in engineering, logistics and cyber. These are the kinds of robotics, coding and electronics roles our workshops give Colchester pupils an early, hands-on taste of.