Calling all UCL students: competition
Deadline extended: 31 Jan. Sit down for a virtual conversation with your grandparents, parents or loved ones to ask them their thoughts on ageing.
Submit a summary of this conversation to UCL Age Innovation Hub by to enter our competition. Then fill out this form to let us know you’ve posted. Deadline for this extended to 31 Jan.
In the process, you’ll boost your CV with public engagement experience, play a part in making life-changing research and be entered into our special prize draw with vouchers up to £150.
In a year of distance, let’s make connections and let’s make a difference.
What’s Age Innovation Hub?
2020 has been a difficult year for us all, but it’s been particularly tough for older people. At UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, our scientists and engineers are doing their best to design technologies that could help people age healthily and live independent, connected and JOY-filled lives.
But to make these as useful as possible, we need your help.
We want to hear from as many people as we can to find out what issues they may experience in their lives and their ideas on how technology can help us age more healthily.
By sitting down with loved ones over Christmas and submitting a post to the Age Innovation Hub together based off your conversation, you’ll be playing an important role in making sure their voices are heard and that their opinions and needs are built into the research that we make at UCL.
Why should I get involved?
First and foremost, you’ll be contributing to life-changing research and you’ll be helping make sure the technologies we create are what people really need.
Everyone entering the competition will receive an official certificate from UCL Engineering’s Vice Dean (Health) that recognises the important role you’ve played in broadening our reach at UCL. These kinds of public engagement activities are great experiences to include on CVs or talk about in interviews.
You’ll also be automatically entered into our prize draw. 15 winners will be picked at random and both themselves and the person they had the conversation with will each receive a £15 JustEats voucher. We recommend you use these to enjoy a meal together (virtually or not) to celebrate!
When our competition closes on 16 Jan, the post on the Hub that’s received the most votes will also receive a £150 online shopping voucher. Use this as motivation to encourage your friends and family to get online and get voting if you feel passionate about making your idea a priority.
Finally, this is a chance to ask questions and connect with loved ones over a conversation – what Christmas is ultimately all about. You may even learn something new about them in the process!
Okay, I’m interested. How do enter the competition?
There are three simple steps to this.
- Find a family member, friend or neighbour and find out about their experiences of ageing (more guidance on this below).
- Submit a summary of these thoughts as a post into one of the challenges on UCL Age Innovation Hub. There are detailed steps here on how to make a post but someone will need to register on the platform first then click ‘join in’ on the most appropriate challenge to post the idea. There are six challenges all related to common issues around ageing. Ideally you should encourage your loved one to create their own profile to post the idea through with your help. You could also submit the post under your own profile name but please try to add some detail in your post about who they are that may help us understand their perspective.
- The final step is to make sure this post counts as an entry into the competition. This ensures you get your certificate and get entered into the prize draw. Fill out this short form (approx. 1min) including the URL link to your post on the Age Innovation Hub. If you make more than one post on different challenges, submit more than one version with the form and its links. This will count as more than one entry into the prize draw.
Who can I talk to as part of my entry?
Anyone! We’re all ageing.
An individual wanting to stay healthy and socially connected despite shielding indoors at the moment may offer a different perspective to a mother/father juggling caring responsibilities for their older parent, which may again be a different perspective to an occupational therapist who has thought of a technology that could make their day at work easier - but these views are all valuable to us. We want to harness the power of crowds and the diversity of perspectives to make technology that matters.
The important role you’ll play is in helping us reach beyond the university to as many different voices as possible.
Any tips on how to have these conversations?
There are six challenge areas on UCL Age Innovation Hub. By entering each and clicking ‘more details’ you’ll get some related facts and questions to help get you thinking. Feel free to use these as prompts in your conversation. The challenges address some common issues like staying active, staying socially connected and living independently in the home.
A helpful place to start is simply by asking the person you’re talking to about their own life experiences – living, working, travelling and caring.
What could make their lives easier? Do they have any everyday annoyances technology could help with? Perhaps they work in healthcare and see common challenges in the workplace? What issues around ageing do they think get overlooked?
The person you’re having a conversation with does not need to be or feel ‘old’ to be useful, we’re all ageing and all live alongside people ageing. We all have something valuable to add here.
Your post doesn't need to be very long, but the most useful submissions do give some context around what experiences led to these thoughts. If there are parts you're not sure about yet, don't be shy to ask the Age Innovation Hub community questions to encourage them to help you evolve your idea. Include this in your post - have any of them experienced similar issues? What do they think the solution might be?
More tips can be found on the Hub ‘how it works’ page here.
Any more questions?
This competition is open to any UCL students (undergraduate, masters and PhD) and also any early-career level postdoctoral researchers. You have until 16 January to enter. Winners will be announced the following week.
Email ageinnovation@ucl.ac.uk or g.cade@ucl.ac.uk with any questions. If you’d like to share this competition with anyone else then we can also send you free, ready-made materials to help.
