STEM ENGAGEMENT
and friends, they
set a challenge:
to imagine
inventions
that would
turn ordinarilyabled
people
into superheroes. That led to a custardinvolved
custard-
ring superhero suit with that they built,
lmed and edited, to test their idea for
a format (www.is.gd/ofugec). Having
spent the rest of the year getting grants
and nancial support, they launched the
You Tube channel in early 2017. (Amos
says that site funding, rather than from
online click-based advertisers, comes
from educational grants and corporate
sponsors, ranging from Autodesk to Hilton
Hotels).
Every month, the duo publish a new
challenge on www.kidsinventstuff.com;
this includes a making activity too.
Children have about two weeks to submit
their ideas. Then the two winnow down
the hundreds of entries to a shortlist of
ve. Then they pick one of those and
make it, lming the process – and
the results – and posting on the
popular social media platform.
When not working together, the two
pursue other projects: Amos her
StairSteady business; Brown other
design engineering projects; both
also take professional speaking
engagements.
The videos are freely available
both to children, among whom You
Tube is ranked by media research as
the number-one media portal. They
are also available for schools. States
Amos: “Any teacher or parent can use
them to make fun, exciting and lowcost
projects. Shawn and I come from
areas that are disadvantaged. Both of
us feel very lucky with the education
that we had, but we know that actually
our schools could not afford lots of
shiny kit. We didn’t want schools to
be put off by that. So we wanted to
do something that is really easy to get
with.
involved We have
invention
ideas that
are sent on
the back of
receipts. Pens
and paper are
things that
every school
has.”
Amos
calls the
contributions
of the children – unbridled by adult
conceptions of feasibility – as ‘magical’.
When asked how the team copes with
the dif culty of actually making some
crazy design, Brown says: “One of our
favourite ways to describe engineering is
that it is about ‘making things happen’.
Engineering design science is about
having the tools and the understanding
and applying them to solve a problem.
When they’re ideas coming in, things
might seem impossible, but with a small
budget and a small amount of time,
engineering does still make a lot of things
possible. Although that process is fraught
sometimes with a little bit of stress, a bit
of failure.”
While admitting that their con dence
in front of the camera has grown over the
last few years, they remain the harshest
critics of their own work, as well as the
other production elements, such as the
editing and music. “But that’s not what
the kids see. They are excited by the
engineering, or the mess, or the fact that
the thing has been designed by a person
of the same age as them,” contends
Amos. “We’ve learned that part of the
project is putting up a video every week
and doing a challenge, and enjoying the
fact that none of these things is 100%
polished, or that you couldn’t sell any of
these; that there is a joy in making one-off
prototypes.”
The fact that the two live on opposite
ends of the country – Amos in Shef eld,
Brown in Cornwall – has served to focus
their minds, they argue. For most of
the month, they communicate virtually;
Amos particularly credits le sharing
site Dropbox. Then, once a month, they
alternate, travelling to either Shef eld or
Cornwall for an intense week of lming.
Says Brown: “Weirdly, the distance
does make us more ef cient. When we
are in the same place, we have to be
really on it, and keep to timeframes. In
our videos, we try to create a story and
a journey. Off-camera, we have to take
a cold hard engineering approach to
organize things and time to make sure we
meet the budget.”
READER COMPETITION
It’s your turn. Readers are challenged to get
involved with a current, and with a previous,
KidsInventStuff challenge. 1 Try your hand in the
KidsInventStuff monthly challenge. November’s
challenge is: noti cation inventions;
see www.is.gd/sevuxa for more.
2 Help Ruth and Shawn. Above is a real entry
submitted for their September challenge on
crazy musical instruments. Your task is propose
the best way to bring The Fire Recorder to life.
Its description reads: “When you blow into the
recorder, re will come out. Also, when you play
it, re will also come out the holes but not the
holes that your ngers are on.”
Contestants should send their ideas to the
editor at engineeringdesigner@ied.org.uk. The
magazine will publish a selection of the best
entries in a future issue.
www.ied.org.uk 15
/ofugec)
/www.kidsinventstuff.com
/sevuxa
/www.ied.org.uk
link