BUDDING computer boffins at Altrincham's Loreto Grammar School have bagged a top award.

The team of Year 7 and Year 8 pupils won the Greater Manchester heat of Cisco's Little Big Award for delivering brilliant new ideas for every day Internet connectivity.

The team was the youngest of the five teams entered by the top Altrincham Catholic grammar school. It won its own school competition through a Dragon's Den play off and now heads to CISCO's UK headquarters in London on March 16 for the national finals.

The girls dreamed up and planned out an idea to connect their back bags to the Internet to allow them to explore the world around them more freely with their parents still knowing their exact location.

Team member Flora Beasley, 12, said: “We are not limiting the idea to a back pack. You could connect your scarf or your dog's collar to the Internet.

Hannah Bowler, 11, said:"Our device can be traceable anywhere.”

Katie Wilkinson, 12, added: “It's just a matter of brain storming. We sit down together think about what is important to us and then try and come up with a solution.”

Loreto also has three older age teams which have reached the finals of the National Big Bang in Birmingham on March 14 to 16 at the NEC where they will showcase their inventions. It is one of only six schools nominated nationwide as a Teen Tech Centre of Innovation and Creativity Gold Level tasked to share ideas and best practise with other schools.

Award winning Loreto Grammar School National Expert STEM teacher, Elaine Manton, who was the only teacher in Europe invited to sit on an influential advisory board in Brussels planning the future of STEM teaching across the Continent, runs a range of STEM related clubs at Loreto with some 50 11 to 18 year-olds attending at lunchtimes four days a week. she is a former U.K. Teen Tech Teacher of the Year

Elaine said: “Young women are now performing just as well as young men in STEM subjects, but when they get into the working world don't have the belief that those top jobs are for them. That's why at Loreto we use the hash tag “Not just for boys.”

She added: “Only one per cent of every day objects are connected to the Internet so we really are at the start of the revolution and all the changes we see around us to today will increase rapidly in years to come and I want our girls to help lead that change.”

Pupil Natalya Fogarty, 12, said: “Mrs Manton pushes us to do our best, but doesn't tell us what to think or how to do it. She supports us and makes learning fun; that's why so many of us come to her clubs.”