A team of teens from Mendip Studio School in Writhlington has been named the runner-up in the Amazon Longitude Explorer Prize, winning £5,000 for their hi-tech rainforest monitoring station.

The prize calls on young people to design and develop tech solutions to the big challenges of our time. Hundreds of young people across the UK entered, working on the ideas since November.

Rainforest DRAGEN project by the Rainforest DRAGEN team at Mendip Studio School is a piece of monitoring hardware for recording environmental data in communities living in and by rainforests to promote conservation. The team members are: Ed Jones, Amalia Page, Alex May, Joe Weyman and Otto Johnson.

It has a companion website for sharing the data and learnings to enable young people across the world to build their own versions. The team has worked with other young people in Borneo and Rwanda already.

The judges felt this was an innovative platform, with a wide range of users –

intersecting technology and young people impressively, with great outreach to communities around the world undertaken already.