Engineer Your Future opened at the Science Museum in London on 17 December 2014. This free exhibition will run for three years
Wondering what to do with the kids during the Christmas break? Why not take a trip into London and visit the Science Museum’s latest exhibition Engineer Your Future.
Aimed at 11 to 15 year olds, the hope is that this interactive exhibition with the hashtag #EngineerYour Future will inspire and engage young people with engineering.
It reveals compelling stories of the women and men who work in engineering today. Engineers developing faster racing yachts, safer building design for areas at risk of tsunamis and smarter artificial hands are featured in a short film (which is pasted below) whilst the cutting-edge prototypes on display illustrate how engineers improve and test their ideas.
On 17th December the Engineer Your Future was opened by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, who is a long-term supporter of UK skills, training and innovation, particularly in the field of engineering, where the current skills shortage could severely affect UK growth.
He described the current engineering skills shortage, remarking that the shortage had reached “critical levels”, but that “The scale of the challenge is also the scale of the opportunity.”
The Prince of Wales met students from Chelsea Academy, Industrial Cadets and Engineering Apprentices during a tour of the exhibition
The exhibition explores engineering through three challenging interactive games that bring to life the skills engineers use every day.
One of these games is FutureVille, a vibrant futuristic cityscape, where users are tasked with collecting and transporting engineers to their place of work, while learning about over 30 real world engineers.
The game is projected onto a large 3D printed mechanical set which moves in response to actions within the game, and can be controlled and played using a smartphone.
The interactive game FutureVille has been produced for the Engineer Your Future exhibition by Nexus Interactive Arts
The exhibition has been supported by a consortium including ABB, BT, EDF Energy, IBM, Mott MacDonald, National Grid, Network Rail and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with additional support from the Royal Academy of Engineering and EngineeringUK.
Steve Holliday, CEO of National Grid and Chair of the consortium, said: “Engineering is creating the future. The internet, the tablet computer, space rockets, the electricity grid that supplies your homes, were all designed, built and maintained by engineers. If creating the things that are going to shape all our futures excites you, then why wouldn’t you want to be an engineer?
“The stark fact is, we need to double the number of engineering related apprentices and graduates in the UK. Engineering makes up to a quarter of UK turnover, there are jobs out there, but there’s a shortage of people with the skills to do those jobs. So it’s not just about individual businesses, it’s about the growth of the UK economy. That’s why we’ve got behind this exhibition, to inspire more young people about the exciting, varied, well paid jobs there are in this field.”
//www.youtube.com/embed/ECgGaKCd_Rg
