Ralph Barton (first year, Natural Sciences) and partner George Illingworth have been selected for the national exhibition stage of Young Engineer for Britain, to be held in March. 

Their entry, CommunicAid,  is much like a low-cost equivalent to Stephen Hawking's computer. It enables people with speech disabilities and partial paralysis to spell out sentences on a screen, using only a couple of different inputs. By successively backlighting letters in different colours, binary (or base 3 or 4) is made intuitive to use.

The project is currently in pieces in Ralph's room but should be working again in a week or so.