Perth pupil Caleb Hutchison has delighted his classmates by winning Simon Howie’s space haggis competition that earned him £500 for new school equipment.
Balhousie Primary School pupil Caleb, 11, designed a mission badge to commemorate one year since the Scottish Butcher launched a haggis to the edge of space.
His artwork was chosen by Simon out of more than 1000 entries from schoolchildren across Scotland.
In January 2021, the butcher took the traditional Scots dish to new heights as he launched it by balloon 107,293 feet (20 miles) above the Earth before it skyrocketed back to land.
The Original 454g Simon Howie Haggis travelled over Stirling, Falkirk and Edinburgh before returning to Earth in the Scottish Borders.
It reached nearly four times the height of Mount Everest and 3.5 times higher than a jumbo jet flies.
And in the run up to Burns Night 2022, celebrated on January 25, Simon teamed up with experts from Stratonauts to provide every primary school in Scotland with a special space lesson.
And it could inspire the next generation of scientists as the video, made in conjunction with the team behind the space haggis mission, educated pupils on what it takes to send something to space and set practical assignments to fuel their learning.
One of the tasks includes designing a badge to celebrate the one-of-a-kind space haggis mission.
Caleb said he was delighted to have been selected as the overall winner out of thousands of entries.
His school will use the £500 prize to purchase new playground equipment which can be enjoyed by all of the school.
And he won a selection of food goodies from Simon Howie’s shop before being presented with his framed entry from the butcher.
Simon Howie said: “We received a lot of messages from schools last year saying how intrigued the children had been of the space haggis mission after seeing it on Newsround.
“We were always meant to be taking the Stratonaut team in to the local schools near us to run an educational workshop on Space Haggis but Covid stopped that.
“In some ways I’m glad as it meant we had to come up with a different approach and this new idea has been able to reach every primary school in Scotland and the response has been phenomenal.”
However there was a clear winner, according to Simon, who said Caleb’s entry “really stood out” among the entries.
And after being blown away by the number of entries, the Scottish Butcher team chose five runners up who received a £50 donation to their school’s fundraising association.
Sadhbh Marchbank, from Kirkmichael Primary School in Blairgowrie, was chosen as one of the runners up and helped her school purchase new art supplies with the funds.
