This was the second meeting of our Young Innovators Council and we brought our council members together to co design the activities and content that we should include in our new hydrogen house to help showcase hydrogen technology.
This was the second meeting of our Young Innovators Council and we brought our council members together to co design the activities and content that we should include in our new hydrogen house to help showcase hydrogen technology.
To share our plans to develop a hydrogen demonstrator house and understand:
Councillors told us that the key things that make an educational visit a good and memorable experience were for it to be interactive, informative, engaging, fun and inspiring.
We will use this to form a key criteria when we are designing the activities and events that form our school visit programme for the house
Having shared our plans so far for the house you told us that in order to make you want to visit the house on an educational visit it needed to be fully ready to live in, be sustainable and aesthetically pleasing and have enough space for visitors to explore and roam around.
We are building the house to look and feel like a current-day home and are fitting the interior with recycled and preloved furniture, fixtures and fittings as much as we possibly can. The house will be designed to encourage independent learning and discovery supported by guided tours to provide information where it’s needed
In discussing what the visitor experience should include you told us we should have competitions, challenges, puzzles and activities for school groups. You also told us all the activities should show visitors the need for change to involve them in the transfer to hydrogen and show that by accepting hydrogen, it is helping towards a net zero transition.
The key purpose of the home is to demonstrate and bring hydrogen technologies to life and show how they fit and work in a domestic setting as part of a hydrogen future. We will ensure that where we can we build interactive STEM based challenges and puzzle into the school visit programme, using the five criteria identified at the start of the session.
You said it was important to have knowledge about hydrogen before any visit and be able to learn about the science behind the house and how it works practically. You also told suggested it would be good to relate a visit to the hydrogen house to an in-school topic.
Ensuring we can educate and inform visitors about hydrogen and hydrogen technologies is of paramount importance to us and we will look at ways we can work with teachers and educational experts to make sure that where we can, we support the school curriculum to ensure visits provided added value and real life benefits from visits.
During discussions around what you wanted to see, hear and do on visits council members suggested over 20 interactive, stem-based activities, exhibitions and informative ways we could inspire and excite schools abut Hydrogen. These included transparent walls and pipes with artificially coloured hydrogen and a number of different games and challenges including using a gaming station with interactive learning, a hydrogen house version of monopoly, a scavenger hunt and even a hydrogen escape room
Whilst we have a limited budget available, we really liked the ideas suggested and will embark upon an exercise to understand how these could be incorporated into the house as part of educational visits. We are already currently planning to include interactive dashboards as part of the visitor experience.
The group also discussed how the hydrogen house could be used to promote STEM careers. The council felt there should be a strong focus on future energy and future jobs rather then focusing on traditional careers and opportunities.
We will make sure that we align the hydrogen house and school visits with our wider education and skills strategy to explore how we can offer the best advice and build out an effective action plan to focus on future jobs and careers, including green apprenticeships.
Council members suggested 12 different activities to build into school visits at the house to provide context to how school subjects link to stem-based jobs and careers in the gas and energy sector.
We are keen to ensure we do as much as possible to excite and encourage people into a future STEM career. We will review the ideas suggested in the session and look to incorporate as many as we can into our programme.