• Question: what got you interested in engineering and how would you make children interested?

    Asked by theyellowumbrella to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 13 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Adam Scott

      Adam Scott answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      FIRST Robotics got me interested in engineering (http://www.usfirst.org/). When I started, I was in high school, so we were competing in the ‘FRC’, FIRST Robotics Competition. During my time on that team, we worked with and started a few other teams, one for the ‘FIRST Tech Challenge’ and a few in the ‘FIRST Lego League’. This was a lot of fun and the whole idea was to make science/engineering ‘cool’, with the main goal being to make engineers/scientists celebrities like movie/music stars, worked for me!

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      As Adam said FIRST robotics is great, but now there is a UK version which is even better! Student Robotics is absolutely amazing:
      https://www.studentrobotics.org/

    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I read some books by Carl Sagan and I think that, and encouragement from teachers, got me interested in Space and engineering. At university I studied some space mission things and that really inspired me. I think that engineering is interesting, it just needs to be included in peoples awareness of what it is and then children will be interested. I do lots of things with schools and colleges to try to show them what my sort of engineering is, and that engineers are different to mechanics in a professional sense.

    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      For me, I think it was Lego 🙂 I loved being able to build things and take them apart and together again, improving the design each time! I also had parents who were supportive of engineering and science and asked me good questions that got me thinking when I was very young. I think that the fundamental principles of engineering – designing things to do something useful – would be a good thing to show young children.

    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      I got interested in engineering by playing with things like Lego and playing with an electronics kit. I got really interested in space engineering by spacecraft going to other planets such as the Voyager missions in the late 1970s and 1980s (I feel very old when I mention these….)

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