STEM Workshops in Fife

Fife's industrial history runs from cloth to warships. In Kirkcaldy, Michael Nairn began floorcloth production in 1847, and when Frederick Walton's patent expired in 1876 Nairn and other floorcloth makers began making linoleum, and the town remained a world producer until the mid-1960s, a trade still recalled in Mary Campbell Smith's 1913 poem about the smell of the linoleum factories. Dunfermline built its own textile trade on damask linen weaving, brought from Edinburgh by the weaver James Blake in 1718, with Erskine Beveridge's St Leonard's Mill, established in 1851, the largest of its factories, before damask weaving went into decline after the First World War. On the Forth, construction of Rosyth Dockyard began in 1909, and its first ship docked there in 1916.

Sandford Fleming, born in Kirkcaldy in 1827, emigrated to Canada in 1845 and became a railway engineer; after missing a train in 1876 because of a timetable error, he proposed a worldwide system of 24 standard time zones, and he also designed Canada's first postage stamp in 1851. James Gregory, who described a design for a reflecting telescope in his 1663 book Optica Promota, became the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews in 1668. Robert Adamson, born in St Andrews in 1821, worked in engineering before turning to photography, and from 1843 partnered David Octavius Hill to produce around 2,500 calotype portraits and a documentary series on the fishing families of Newhaven.

Rosyth Dockyard is now owned by Babcock International, having carried out final assembly of the aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, and Babcock is building the Royal Navy's five Type 31 frigates there. In St Andrews, the University's Sea Mammal Research Unit, established in 1978 and based at the University since 1996, supplies advice to the UK Government on the management of seals.

Fife College teaches across Kirkcaldy, Dunfermline, Glenrothes and Levenmouth campuses, with courses spanning computing and software development, automotive engineering and Modern Apprenticeships. The University of St Andrews' Sea Mammal Research Unit, where staff and students carry out research on marine mammals, shows a route into marine biology through university study. At Rosyth, where Babcock International is building the Type 31 frigates, the company recruits skilled trades such as welders and fabricators and offers apprenticeships through its early careers programme.