DESIGN
What engineers can learn from children’s fresh thinking
When Rebecca, a pupil from Kelvinside Academy in Scotland, was asked what she would do if she were an engineer, she decided that she wanted to help people sleeping rough to stay warm. Her idea – a solar-powered heated blanket – has since been recognised by Time Magazine, which named her ‘Girl of the Year’, and by The Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal, where she took home both a Silver Medal and a first-of-its-kind Commendation Medal voted for by the public, showing that real solutions to real-world problems can come from the youngest minds.
By Sheryl Miles, Associate Editor
Seeing problems differently According to Shelter Scotland, a household becomes homeless every fifteen minutes. Between 2024 and 2025 alone more than 40,000 applications for homelessness assistance were recorded, with over 31,000 open cases by March 2025. These statistics often stem from complex logistics. But to Rebecca, who noticed a homelessness problem in her community, the crisis led her to wonder: what can I do to help keep
people a little warmer at night?
Her heated blanket idea, part of her entry into The Primary Engineer Leaders Award – an annual UK-wide competition inviting children aged from three to 19 to identify a problem in their community and propose a creative engineering solution – is designed to give warmth to people without access to power after The Primary Engineer Competition posed the question
14 ELECTRONICSPECIFIER.COM
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