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By Chiwing Man on

Visitor Inventions

Hamster-powered vegetable gardens, multi-tasking hats with limbs and rubber-producing clouds. Our visitors are a creative lot. Check out some of the crazy contraptions they've come up with.

Hamster-powered vegetable gardens, multi-tasking hats with limbs and rubber-producing clouds. Our visitors are a creative lot.

We give our visitors the tools (colouring pencils and paper) to doodle down any ideas they have whilst in our Launchpad gallery.

Some creations are pure genius. Others, lets face it, are a bit weird. However, there is definitely a common theme. Most of the inventions we get from the kiddies are either about food or homework/housework robots. Basically anything that makes their lives easier.

Here’s a small selection of the inventions drawn up by some of our imaginative visitors. Click on any image to see bigger pictures.

Explainer Fact: We get through 100,000 paper trace cards every year (used ones get recycled).

Chiwing Man

As an Explainer Developer, Chi's role is to engage visitors in science via demonstrations, workshops and through play.  Chi gets to make lots of bubbles and enjoys sharing visitor creations, highlighting the great work done by the Explainers.

Chiwing has written 33 posts

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4 comments on “Visitor Inventions”

  1. Great stuff!

    As part of a final Masters degree project a few years back, I ran science/art workshops at some local primary schools – getting the children to draw future designs. Their work as available at https://www.norobots.org

    Do you keep many of the children’s work? I’m happy to have more inventions added to the current repository!

    1. Hi Alan.

      Thanks for your interest in our visitor drawings. School children (and adults alike – especially at our museum lates) are a creative lot. Some of the artwork created are usually displayed within the Launchpad gallery for a short period of time, before being gradually replaced by newer masterpieces. Unfortunately, we don’t keep the drawings once they have been taken down from display as we simply don’t have the space. We get through 100,000 paper trace cards every year and used ones get recycled.

      More drawings (not necessarily just inventions) will be posted on the blog in the future.

      1. Thanks for the reply Explainer Chi,

        Rather than holding onto the original cards, I was thinking that the childrens’ wonderful creations could be kept as part of a digital repository/library. This could be achieved by (automatically?) scanning or photographing the drawings on their way to a nice recycling bin (get one of the big scanning companies to sponsor this perhaps?). The drawings could then magically appear on the website and, as a subsequent project, you could include a digital 3D printer so that a model of their creations drops out of the other end (there are 3D printers out there that use card/paper so you could actually up-cycle rather than re-cycle 🙂

        1. Hi Alan,

          Thanks for your suggestions. We do look at all of the drawings made by our visitors and the lucky few that are selected to appear on this blog will be saved on to our systems for possible future use.

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