Global engineering company, Renishaw, is hosting a free webinar on Saturday (March 19) to celebrate British Science Week.

The online event will teach schoolchildren in years 5 to 9 how science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) can be applied to real world industries, including engineering.

The webinar will be hosted by Gloucestershire-based Renishaw employees, who use STEM knowledge in their day-to-day work, and will encourage younger generations to consider the engineering industry as a career option.

It will include instructions for a science experiment and talks from Renishaw scientists and guest speaker, Dr Jessica Wade, a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London.

The webinar will replicate last year's virtual mathematics webinar sessions, which included an introductory talk about Renishaw, helping the students gain a better understanding of the role of an engineering business and the importance of maths and science to the industry.

Rebecca Bound, early careers STEM outreach officer at Renishaw, said: "Renishaw has run engineering-based educational outreach programmes for many years, but we decided to change the format last year.

"We realised that engineering doesn't immediately appeal to all schoolchildren, but many of them have a passion for STEM subjects at school. We found that they wanted to learn more about these subjects in their spare time, so we created a set of four virtual webinars, each of which focuses on one of the specific STEM topics. The virtual webinars we ran previously saw a brilliant mix of girls and boys being interested in all the events

"The engineering industry is on course for a large skills gap in the coming years, so it is great to see a diverse group of younger people interested in a career in STEM and specifically engineering. We hope that by continuing to run interactive and engaging sessions, we will help inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists."

Register for the virtual webinar here.