"Girls can do anything!" - Celebrating Women in STEM at Ada Lovelace Day 2025

We were back working in partnership with Pioneer Group to run our 8th annual event celebrating Ada Lovelace Day with children and young people across Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, and Derby. Over two days in October at BioCity Nottingham and  MediCity Nottingham, almost 300 school pupils from KS2 and KS3 took part in a range of STEM activities with scientists, researchers, and STEM businesses.  

Ada Lovelace Day is all about celebrating the achievements and inspiring the next generation of women in STEM and here in Nottingham, we have a special connection with Ada Lovelace with our events at BioCity and MediCity providing hands-on interactions with women and non-binary scientists who are breaking down barriers and negative stereotypes about what it means to be a scientist, just like Ada!  

“We use it as a hook for our disadvantaged pupils to show them that they are represented in all aspects of STEM.” - Teacher

On 13th October, our first event, we welcomed 130 children from 2 primary schools and 1 alternative provision in the immediate area to BioCity Nottingham.  Our second event, on 14th October at MediCity Nottingham, welcomed 150 girls from secondary schools in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, and Derby.  They took part in engaging practical activities and talks such as inventing improvements for toothpaste or trainers, constructing marble runs, learning about biomaterials and 3D printing, creating medical communications posters, a waste-water purification competition, experiments with chromatography and sugar porosity, programming Ozobots, learning about hacking, and timing the flow of blood. 

“It was a very interesting and varied ALD this year, felt it truly covered more letters of STEM and different avenues of Science”  - Teacher

Pupils who attended shared their experience of the day which some sharing new technical skills “I learnt how to use a pipette and make accurate readings”, while others learnt about careers “I learnt about all the options in STEM and it’s not all in the labs”, and sensory experiences “Noise can be amplified in different ways”.  At the end of the events, through our welcome and exit surveys, we also found that we had a 45% increase in the number of pupils who said that they would like to be scientists when they were older!!

A huge thank you goes to all those who delivered a workshop for Ada Lovelace Day and provided such engaging and inspiring experience for the schools who attended:  Freenome Ltd., Porterhouse Medical, Locate Bio, 4D Medicine, Nottingham Trent University Biosciences, University of Nottingham Computer Science, Trelleborg, Stratasys, Inaphaea, Spark STEM,  Worn Again, Reach Separations, HGF and Platelet Services.  Thanks to the interactive workshops, demonstrations, career talks, and experiments!  As a result of your amazing work, the pupils told us that “Science is more than explosions”, “Science is cooler than I thought”, and that “Scientists can be any gender”!

“Ada Lovelace Day has helped me enjoy and learn about science” - Secondary school pupil

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace collaborated with inventor Charles Babbage on his general-purpose computing machine, the Analytical Engine. In 1843, she published what we would now call a computer program to generate Bernoulli Numbers. Lovelace was the first person to foresee the creative potential of the Engine. Her vision of computing’s possibilities was unmatched by any of her peers and went unrecognised for a century.

Ada Lovelace Day was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson in 2009 as a celebration aimed at highlighting the achievements of women in STEM fields and fostering the creation of new role models who can inspire young individuals to pursue STEM careers. Ignite!'s partnership with Pioneer Group has been running events in celebration of this occasion since 2018. Find out more about Ada Lovelace Day here.