Empiribox @ Home receives funding to support schools during COVID-19

We are proud to be one of over 800 businesses to be awarded with funding as part of Innovate UK’s ‘Business-led innovation in response to global disruption’ competition!

About the competition

Back in April 2020, Innovate UK were tasked with investing £750 million in UK businesses by the government. The purpose: to support and drive innovation by fast-tracking projects that could boost the country’s economy in response to the Coronavirus pandemic.
The ‘Business-led innovation in response to global disruption’ competition attracted a record-breaking 20,000 applications to develop and make their products and services market-ready from a pool of £40 million. At Empiribox, we saw this fantastic and essential opportunity to enable digital access to primary science education for young learners through Empiribox @ Home.
With experiments that can be conducted at home, children can continue their education with a wide range of resources, including interactive demonstration videos with embedded questions and assessment workbooks that meet the National Curriculum. All of which are available online.
However, in order to cover the National Curriculum, allow teachers to assess pupils’ progress, and deliver lessons that can be supervised by parents, guardians and carers without any prior scientific knowledge – approximately 180 experiments, lessons and supporting resources needed to be developed. This was made possible by Innovate UK’s generous funding.

Empiribox and global disruption

While primary education aligned with the National Curriculum is currently interrupted during COVID-19, Empiribox @ Home enables primary science education to continue. Prior learning can also be reinforced during distance learning due to the pandemic, as well as other scenarios when children are unable to attend school. We firmly believe Empiribox @ Home addresses a key societal issue that the UK needs more science/ STEM graduates as current early science education is not adequate enough. With interruptions from school closures during the pandemic, the quality of science education risks adding learning gaps to the mix.
With the funding from Innovate UK, this allows Empiribox @ Home science lessons to be delivered to thousands of schools and millions of individual pupils. This has also helped schools to access the future potential to license the system and/or upgrade schools to the classroom based system – with all resources compliant with COVID-19 requirements.
After receiving this recognition, we have been able to research and develop simplified lessons for home delivery and develop the rest of the system with the intention to prevent learning gaps until it’s safe for all children to return to school – and to provide better, long-term resources for essential science and STEM education.
Discover more visit Empiribox @ Home here.
From all of us at Empiribox, we hope Empiribox @ Home helps teachers, students and parents to stay safe and engaged during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.