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News Guest Speaker: Professor Peter Childs 18.03.2022

As part of our STEM Week celebrations, Professor Peter Childs, the Professorial Lead in Design Engineering at Imperial College London, came in to talk to Year 8 students about creative thinking in engineering.

With over 200 academic publications and 100 designs to his name, Professor Childs was the founding Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial, where the problem solvers and change-makers of tomorrow develop a range of fundamental design and engineering skills to make innovative solutions to modern challenges. Professor Childs spoke at length about the creative process and the ‘Seven Bs of Creativity’ – how ideas can come from anywhere and at any time – and the inventors approach to creativity; from the initial idea to the first sketches and calculations, evaluation to producing the final solution.

We were also delighted to welcome Kirstie Taylor, a fourth year Design Engineering student at Imperial College, who gave the girls some fascinating insight into her degree, and had them firing plenty of questions at her on how she came up with her ideas.

The theme of this year’s STEM Week has been around problem solving, and Professor Childs ended the talk by asking students, ‘Are you going to be subject to the changes and challenges in our world? Or are you going to be a supplier of change?’. Many left feeling inspired and keen to use their creativity to create solutions to problems.