The organisation provides a range of programmes, competitions and resources designed to introduce young learners to engineering concepts and careers through hands-on activities and real-world applications.
By partnering with engineers, schools, and businesses, Primary Engineer works to bridge the gap between education and industry, fostering a passion for engineering from an early age.
Industrial partners include Thales, which is heavily involved in Primary Engineer’s ‘If You Were an Engineer, What Would You Do?' competition, part of Primary Engineer’s Leaders Awards.
In part one of the Q&A below, Dr Susan Scurlock MBE, founder & CEO of Primary Engineer, explains how the competition works, including how some future engineers have their entry prototyped by Thales’ apprentices and early career engineers.
When and why did you establish Primary Engineer?
We started in 2005 with the idea of bringing engineering into primary schools to inspire children to enjoy learning, and engineering was the perfect vehicle for that because it brought together curiosity, creativity, practical skills, and the academic side.
We train teachers how to deliver that, and we have three channels: we have programmes where we train teachers to deliver projects in the classroom with resources and materials, which Thales has been involved in. Whilst they're sector-specific, they're very much around what the curriculum requires. They bring in engineers who work in different sectors to enable children to get a sense of a broad range of careers.
We then have qualifications, where we train teachers to understand how to embed engineering in their classrooms, to understand what engineering careers are available, and really identifying that engineering sits within any subject within school, and how young people should be able to carry those subject interests into a career in engineering.
The last channel is where we look at competitions and the reason we do competitions is because they're centrally funded, therefore any school, anywhere, can take part. That's really important for us because what we want is that really broad engagement of schools that may, or may not, have engaged with engineering before, but are able to because the competitions are free. The idea of it is to enable children to see that engineering is in everything and this year we've had around about 72,000 participate. Now they all...see engineering as something that is creative, problem solving, and, importantly, helps other people or helps the world.
How does the 'If You Were an Engineer' part of Leaders Award work?
For the Leaders Award the children, who can be from any year group, identify a problem, draw a solution to it, then write a letter to an engineer explaining why it should be built.
We get all those entries in, and we grade every one of them; all the engineers that were involved with get involved in grading days. Then, every child gets a certificate with a grade on it in their name that they know an engineer has read.
The judging panels [have] bun fights with every single one of them; which ones should get ‘Winning’ and which ones should get ‘Highly Commended’. Then we have the awards: we have 25 awards around the country and 25 exhibitions.
What do the professional engineers get from it?
We designed this programme to have engineers inspire children, and what we've ended up with is children inspiring engineers, and that is just completely out of the ordinary when you look at projects themselves, not just in that the engineers are going away [saying] STEM engagement is really important – ‘it's good for me, I improved my public speaking skills’ - it's actually technical skills that they're learning as well when they're developing the prototypes.
Some of the work that comes out of that has been extraordinary, [Thales ProtoTeams] built five this year. Thales is the first company that said ‘we want to use this as part of the development of our young engineers’, so they've really broken the mould. We've now got more companies that are saying 'actually, we're looking at that as a way of developing young engineers'. We like the way that that begins to lock in their confidence when they're talking at the exhibitions, but also that they worked with children as designers.
Have you found participants to be very exacting?
There was a beautiful moment from last year when the ‘Face for a Plant’ was [prototyped] in Glasgow and taken down to the child in London. There was that moment where they've put it under a cover [for] the big reveal, and the kid just looked at it and said, 'it's supposed to be blue'.
We went back and we did it, but you know kids are really 'no, no, no, it's got to look like this', so there's a real amount of skill in talking to children.
I was in Belfast a couple of days ago....and they literally brought in the kitchen sink. They designed [a] tap, but then carried in a kitchen sink into the middle of an auditorium. It's not only the kids that look at it with utter wonder, but also the parents and the stories those parents will tell and the stories that will have ripple effects...it's absolutely extraordinary.
Last thoughts?
Just to add on, we've got the Primary Engineer Mac Robert Medal, which is what we're...awarding on an annual basis now, which recognises that level of innovation and devotion that young engineers are putting into the work that they do in terms of the prototyping.
In part two of our Q&A, The Engineer talks to staff at Thales UK about their involvement with Primary Engineer and benefits it brings to them and the young people involved.
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