YEAR 9 students from London, Swindon, Copenhagen and Callington Community College took part in the fifth annual Communication 2020 event recently — a Dragon's Den style pitching competition.

All of the competing schools took a very different approach with Callington's being focused on developing apps for mobile telephones. The whole project was kick started by the college's NASA students who Skyped a presentation to the whole of Year 9 about some of the new technologies they employed while at NASA.

Following on from that, each Year 9 English class was given the challenge of developing an app and a sales pitch for that app in their lessons. Each class chose a winning team and that team was offered the opportunity to begin preparing for the competition.

A group of 13 then spent an intensive couple of weeks working on the development of the chosen app, aimed at musicians and called 'See Hear'.

For the presentation the students worked with Plymouth University, National Networks for Collaborative Outreach, Imattination and Celtic Coaching as well as some local employers from the Callington Sole Traders organisation.

The students worked exceptionally well, creating t-shirt designs, writing a special jingle, shaping the app and developing the business plan to present as a part of their presentation.

Only six members of the group were allowed to present and those six students travelled up to the Alec Reed Academy to present alongside the other British schools.

The Callington presentation unfortunately did not win, but the students were confident of their product, in control of their presentation and were able to answer questions from a panel of Alec Reed employees and of Danish business people.

The headteacher of one of the competing schools spoke of Callington's 'truly outstanding presentation'.