An Adventure in Legoland
By Nikita Asnani, postgraduate student in the School of Engineering
I organized a workshop in collaboration with Young Engineers Warwick (YEW) during the ESRC Festival 2022.
8.50 am: I stood with the 3 women in green t-shirts that said ‘Young Engineers Warwick’ chatting away and arranging the fantastic ‘Lego-kits’ that young engineers walking through the door any minute now will be using.
9.20 am: Things swiftly picked up pace in The Swift Center at the Coventry Transport Museum. Sounds of tea pouring and biscuits being broken and passed between us four (organisers), now being replaced by rustling feet of parents being pulled to their seats by excited children who looked at their toolkits, wondering when they can tear open the glass lid concealing the building blocks of the day.
9.40 am: The young engineers now receive their challenge brief to engineer a carousel to be added to an amusement park being built as part of ‘Coventry, City of Culture 2020’. They are handed a booklet to do the same. Before they start, Maninder, the lead-facilitator at YEW, and owner of YEW asks the golden question, ‘what is engineering’. Everyone throws their hat into the ring: ‘it’s about building bridges!’, ‘fixing stuff!’, ‘and designing?’ Maninder gives a few nods and a few yeses accompanied by a few dreaded buts. There is no affirmation of a correct response yet and the stakes are high. The build-up has almost reached its climax and just as Maninder is about to mouth the answer, a young boy in a green sweater shouts “its about helping people!”.
10.30 am: The kids grappled with concepts such as centrifugal force as they decided to add more seats to the carousel, seeing for themselves the trade-off it has with other aspects of the ride such as speed, stability, and structure. It was magical to see these young engineers calmly pick up stranded pieces of lego after their ride came collapsing down, ready to have another go at it, without showing any signs of frustration. It was also interesting to see how some kids preferred working in pairs with other kids, whilst others worked with their parents, sometimes imitating patterns (a young boy shouting ‘you copied my design!!’ met with his dad encouragingly saying ‘well, it was a pretty good design’), and sometimes being starkly different from these patterns.
11 am: Kids took home a certificate of completion along with some Lego bricks and Lego mini figure crayons as mementos of a job well done!
Special thanks to:
The ESRC Festival of Social Science for the funding
Sarah Hayball, Caz and other staff at the Coventry Transport Museum who helped us on the day
James Brown, Warwick Institute of Engagement who helped us organise and get funding to put this together
Maninder Kaur, YEW, who designed and led the workshop
Marie Diebolt, Widening Participation Team, University of Warwick, with whose help we were able to ensure that this event reached as many kids and parents as it did!
