Skills for Learning, Life & Work

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) places skills for life, learning and work at the heart of its design. Our young people don’t just need to pass exams in traditional subjects, they need to learn skills that they can apply in their future careers and life, we need to link their classroom experiences to those in the workplace and help them develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, organisation and management.

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Young Engineers programmes are ideally placed to support the development of these life skills in a fun, engaging and memorable way. Classes enrich the experiences of learners in a stimulating environment helping children develop confidence in their learning. Opportunities exist to deliver an interdisciplinary learning experience combing technical understanding, entrepreneurial thinking, responsibility and leadership across all primary school stages.

We deliver our learning experiences across both workshops provided in a single session and multi-week structured programme that can be integrated into ongoing learning across your school.

Examples include:

Problem Solving & Critical Thinking (Early, First Stages)

These workshops use simple LEGO models which children are then asked to improve, for example make the car go faster/slower, can you move items across a greater distance using your conveyor belt. Children are encouraged to question each other and to work together to identify an answer.

We encourage the sessions to be personalised to the group of pupils, this can be done with selection of specific LEGO models to tie in to learning themes in the school or can include additional activities that allow children to express their own area of interest, for example children could create a poster to of their session and present it to other children in the school.

Leadership, Organisation & Teamwork (Second Stage)

As children enter primary 7 and start to consider their senior school experience we have the opportunity to engage them in learning scenarios that more closely resemble work place activities. Our workshop for in Leadership Organisation & Teamwork is delivered via the idea of a sales presentation. Children are divided into teams, leaders are appointed, tasks defined and allocated and a schedule created. The teams will be responsible for building a new ‘product’, preparing a presentation to describe the product and defining how much the product cost. Participants are encouraged to think laterally and to design their own product improvements and enhancements. The presentation creates the opportunity to develop communication skills and confidence in clear communication with a group. Success can only come from working together, using the skills and strengths of our team mates and working through a clear plan.

These activities can be split across multiple sessions or condensed into a single afternoon depending on the needs of the school and timetable. We can work with various school departments to develop both preparatory and follow up activities that create learning opportunities in other areas such as use of presentation software, numeracy (in developing the cost) and report writing to enable literacy and key business skills.

All our school sessions provide the opportunity to mix both technical learning and life skills, delivering an interdisciplinary programme for young learners. We aim to develop confident children who are motivated to question their environment and develop their natural curiosity. We hope that in acting as a partner to your school we can support CfE aims, to deliver a broad general education, creating independent learners in an inclusive and supportive environment that enables different rates of learning and personalisation of the learning experience.