OUR GRANT FUNDS ASTON VILLA’S SCIENCE THROUGH FOOTBALL PROJECT

Every year, the Millennium Point Charitable Trust Small Grants programme gives out grants of up to £20,000 to support science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education projects in the West Midlands. We have funded many different projects across all areas of STEM, supporting learning development for young students.

Here is another great example of the type of work we do, this project was funded in 2020 and shows the power of what the grants funding can achieve for STEM organisations.

Who are Aston Villa Foundation?

The Aston Villa Foundation is a registered charity that delivers the community and social responsibility work of Aston Villa Football Club. With a mission of ‘Working Together to Enrich Lives’, the foundation and its partners work with people from a variety of backgrounds in Birmingham as well as supporting the wider ‘Aston Villa family’ through schools, football in the community, disability, health and wellbeing, education, interventions and community relations.

Why did they apply for a Millennium Point Grant?

The Aston Villa Foundation reached out to the Millennium Point Charitable Trust to help support it’s STEM Stars: Science Through Football project. The project will be developed across six schools, all within a three-mile radius of Villa Park. The funding will be used to purchase a Sphero robot package (which includes robots and a small pitch) that uses football to engage young people in coding. The students will learn and use specific lines of code to operate a moving ball on the pitch, recreating Aston Villa goals from the Premier League season.

The video below showcases this process in action on our Platform event space.

What impact has the project made?

The project has so far been a huge success, impacting a cluster of schools within the Aston area. It gives children the perfect opportunity to fully engage in computer science, in a fun way that keeps them interested to learn new skillsets. The grant provided by Millennium Point has allowed these schools to run these activities, which otherwise wouldn’t of been able to due to a lack of funding and resources.

Aston Villa Foundation using football to unlock new learning potential

The Aston Villa Foundation have been hugely pleased with the results and potential of the project. They caught up with us for a chat and said: “The funding will allow us to be innovative with our provision in schools and make a difference within the local community by equipping the next generations with potential skill sets of the future and looking positively ahead in an ever-evolving technological world.

It will provide us with a further opportunity to have a positive impact on children and schools, by enriching their curriculums through this unique programme to experience, learn and develop through STEM, with the power of football and the club as a key instigator to unlocking learning potential.”

Want to get your school involved?

The Aston Villa Foundation will be targeting schools in it’s local community around Villa Park, these areas include Erdington, Ladywood and Perry Barr. For more information please email Paul Hughes by clicking below.

GET IN TOUCH

About educational grant funding from Millennium Point

Educators, Charities and Not-for-Profits within the West Midlands Combined Authority can apply for up to £20,000 from Millennium Point to fund their STEM activity. For more information on how to access this funding please visit www.millenniumpoint.org.uk/grants

---

Find more interesting content from Millennium Point over at our news section, or follow us for daily updates on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn with @MillenniumPoint. Millennium Point is a landmark public building and multi-award-winning events venue in the Eastside of Birmingham City centre. Profits from our commercial activity are invested by the Millennium Point Charitable Trust into projects, events and initiatives which support the growth of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and education in the West Midlands.