Behind
camera the
The Big Bang Fair is a national
celebration of science,
technology, engineering and
mathematics. Over a long
weekend, the travelling show
takes over regional exhibition centres,
inviting local schoolchildren to meet
hundreds of universities and industrial
companies, along the way trying out
tools and equipment, and hearing from
inspirational speakers from all branches of
the sciences.
The event also hosts a national
engineering project competition, awarding
the winner the accolade of Young British
Engineer of the year. Lawyer-to-be Ruth
Amos won that very prize in 2006 for
StairSteady, a project that began in
her design technology GCSE course. A
horizontal bar that slides along a handrail
to help people climb stairs, the design
has since been commercialised as
the StairSteady, and persuaded her to
move away from law. Four years later,
while judging the competition, she met
contestant Shawn Brown, whose project
year’s prize.
Shawn, who is dyslexic, struggled in
school exams because of his dif culty
retaining information; but making things
was a different matter. They shared an
unconventional route into engineering.
That common background made both very
keen on improving public engagement
with STEM, as epitomized by the Big Bang
Fair.
Looking back, Amos regrets the
very lack of engagement when she was
growing up. The few female faces on the
engineering-themed television shows she
loved, such as Scrapheap Challenge and
Robot Wars, didn’t get involved in the
making. The realisation that she could
become an engineer only came after
meeting female engineers and people
like Kate Bellingham, a former presenter
of Tomorrow’s World. “If there had been
more women making and designing and
inventing when I was growing up, I would
have considered it more.”
Adds Brown: “We both had a keen
interest in communicating to science
and engineering relates to every aspect
of life. Everything that’s been made has
had science and engineering practice
involved in its creation. There are in nite
opportunities for employment in the
sector, and it’s something that is creative
at its core. We wanted to show that young
people’s interest in drawing and making
is fundamentally an engineering or design
practice.”
Having had lots of conversations over
the years, but never actually acting on
anything, Amos and Brown nally took the
plunge in summer 2016, and collaborated
on a self- nanced video pilot episode
based partly on Brown’s outreach work
vesnafoto/adobe.stock.com
Take two prize-winning engineers, add a common bond and the
result is a hard-working team behind the internet video STEM
channel Kids Invent Stuff.
with young people about how science
to design a vehicle with the lowest carbon
footprint possible – which ended up as
a recumbent bicycle built using bamboo
canes – won the
because of where we had come from,
and that led us to want to be able to
communicate
with dyslexic children. To the children of
family
14 www.ied.org.uk
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/www.ied.org.uk