Doha College hosts “Reduce through Reuse” Design and Technology competition
Doha College, in partnership with COBIS and InnovationBen, recently ran a brand-new online Design and Technology Competition, titled 'Reduce through Reuse.' COBIS is the Council of British International Schools and InnovationBen is an organisation ran by Ben Edmonds, globally recognised inventor, engineer and product designer, and Principal Engineer in the New Product Innovation department at Dyson. Together with Doha College, they aim to encourage creativity, lateral thinking and sustainable living. 45 international schools took part in the competition, and put forward brilliantly ingenious products.
Students collected electro-mechanical products that were broken, disused or discarded, and breathed new life into them using innovation combined with model-making skills. Examples of outcomes given to the students included an old bicycle transformed into a trailer that could be used for a mobile business, discarded LED string lights sewn into clothing to make cyclists more visible, or a discarded bicycle wheel transformed into a kinetic sculpture.
Although the finished products did not need to be highly polished or focused on aesthetics, they had to meet a number of requirements, like be useful or solve a problem, cost nothing to produce, and be made of recycled/discarded objects. They had to be able to be completed within a normal DT workshop or classroom, and the emphasis was on repeatable processes with minimal machinery to achieve the desired output.
The judging panel, comprising qualified practitioners from the industry and non-competing school, assessed the entries based on concept, manufacturing process, outcome and the personal skills involved in the making of the products. Awards were given for three categories: innovation (clever or unexpected outcome given the starting object), resilience (bouncing back from failure) and storytelling (most innovative presentation, the problem it now solves and the effort required to bring it to life). Listen to Ben explain more about the competition 👇.
The schools with the best designs were The British School in the Netherlands (Innovation), Oxbridge Tutorial College Lagos, Nigeria (Resilience), and Azerbaijan British College (Storytelling) – congratulations to them and to all who entered their products. Watch this video to see what Ben had to say about them.
It has been an exciting opportunity for students around the world, from a huge range of cultures and experiences, to engage in real-world problems, being viewed by real-world engineers.
Steven Daly, Design and Technology Teacher