Question: what will the Engineering academys tech children and who will run them

Ryan Bakewell answered on 6 Mar 2016:

My thinking is that we’d offer an insight in to what engineering is all about in the real world. So over a number of weeks we’d work through phases of the engineering lifecycle. Things like:
-How to capture the customer requirements (it sounds easy, but its actually very hard as customers don’t really know what they want!). So we’d look at ways of doing that.
-How to come up with an initial design – things like prototyping, modelling, concept design etc.
-How to make sure the design is right before spending too much money and time making it happen.
-We’d teach how to products are engineered to be robust for everyday use (i.e. can we break it!)
-We’d also teach how things get tested and eventually ‘signed off’ and ready to be sold to the customer.

Clearly I can’t teach, nor can you learn, everything there is to know about engineering in an after school club. But what I can do is offer and insight in to how it all works and we can have a lot of fun on the way. You never know, you might come up with a product that we can develop together and take it on Dragons Den!

Who will run them? Initially myself and my fiancé (who is a primary school teacher). But going forward I’d hope to be able to get more of my engineering colleagues involved in the initiative.