STEM Workshops in North Wales

North Wales has a deep engineering heritage that stretches from the slate quarries of Eryri to the cutting edge of aerospace. The Airbus factory at Broughton in Flintshire has built aircraft for more than 80 years, turning out the wartime Vickers Wellington and de Havilland Mosquito and, later, the de Havilland Comet, the world's first jet airliner. The region also helped pioneer civil nuclear power: the Magnox station at Trawsfynydd generated from 1965 to 1991, and Wylfa on Anglesey ran from 1971 until 2015. Bangor University, founded in 1884, established its School of Ocean Sciences on the Menai Strait.

Tom Parry Jones (1935 to 2013), born and raised on Anglesey and a graduate of Bangor University, invented and marketed the first handheld electronic breathalyser, winning the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1980. The Wrexham-educated physicist C. E. Wynn-Williams (1903 to 1979), who studied at Bangor, built the scale-of-two counter, an electronic counting circuit that was a key step towards the modern computer. Sir Robin Williams, a semiconductor and solid-state physicist who graduated from the University College of North Wales, went on to become Chancellor of Bangor University.

Broughton is today a global centre of excellence for wing manufacturing, employing more than 6,000 people and building wings for the Airbus A320, A330 and A350. At St Asaph, the OpTIC Technology Centre, run by Wrexham University, anchors a photonics and optronics cluster. M-SParc on Anglesey, opened by Bangor University in 2018 as Wales' first science park, incubates low-carbon energy, environment and ICT companies. In November 2025 Wylfa was named the site of the UK's first small modular reactor power station, and North Wales was confirmed as a location for an AI Growth Zone, predicted to create 1,200 jobs.

Bangor University offers degrees in ocean sciences, electronic engineering, computer science and environmental science, while Wrexham University runs a broad degree-apprenticeship offering in North Wales, covering software engineering, cyber security, mechanical and electrical engineering, production engineering and clean energy. Airbus Broughton offers apprenticeships in aerospace manufacturing, and the OpTIC centre links school leavers and graduates to the photonics and space-technology firms clustered at St Asaph. The new nuclear programmes at Wylfa and Trawsfynydd, the latter advanced by development company Cwmni Egino with its ambition for a medical radioisotope facility, are set to open further routes into nuclear engineering and nuclear medicine.