About ENGAGE – Engineering Animations Engagement
Project ‘Engineering Animations’ (ENGAGE) empowered local children from Llanmartin Primary School (Newport) and Mount Stuart Primary School (Cardiff Bay) with new skills to co-create animations alongside local animators and engineers from Cardiff University and Swansea University.
The animations focused on topics such as: the future electricity grid, sustainable transport, active buildings, manufacturing technologies and more to increase awareness of the future environmental engineering developments undertaken in universities to reduce global warming and increase sustainability.
Engineering Animations encouraged the next generation of engineers by sparking curiosity about sustainable engineering and future technologies. Local children visited both Swansea and Cardiff Universities to learn about the research undertaken in the lab and took knowledge from this visit to develop their own animations through a follow-up eight-week animation course at their school. At the school workshops local animators first taught animation skills and then encouraged children to develop their own storyboard, visuals, voiceovers, script and full animations to explain Engineering topics to everyone with the help of engineers.
Key outcomes
The workshops encouraged inclusivity and understanding by engaging school children of all backgrounds to co-create animations, this made the activity accessible for those children who might typically be drawn to arts topics at school.
In the ENGAGE project, children were encouraged to develop both imaginative illustrative animation skills and knowledge of STEM topics for an informative video topic. Children who typically struggle to engage with classroom activities practically made decisions on story direction and characters. Children who might otherwise find conceptual science challenging, found practical examples of engineering science being used to enhance society through real world application graphically expressed through animation. Furthermore, the project undertook an EDI advisory panel workshop to actively improve EDI content in the final animations and learn lessons for the future of the project.
The final animations were showcased at local school assemblies where they were unveiled and have since been released to the wider public online. The animations were shown at further events including, Cardiff Museum After Dark (1500), Welsh festival Eisteddfod and Swansea Science Festival 4 increasing knowledge in the local community about pressing technological and environmental challenges and inspiring change in future generations. The animations created in this project will be shown at even more events and developed as a teaching resource to help visualise and explain to the general public the exciting and crucial research undertaken by engineers.
To find out more about this project, read our case study and hear more from the University of Cardiff project team.
