Careers week

Drawing of a fox looking towards a building

This morning I went to Netley Primary School & Centre for Autism , as part of their careers week, to speak about the Built Environment as part of their careers week with Inspiring the Future.

It was a brilliant session with 38 incredibly engaged 7 year olds who not only knew that there are women architects but recited to me Zaha Hadid's bio (including a description of her use of geometry and of her first ever built building) before I started my presentation.

We discussed the impact of weather and availability of materials on the shaping of architectures, the impact that poorly design built environment can have on cities and what we could do instead AND we collectively found ways to improve the areas surrounding the school.

It went really well and I loved that after we finished and they went to the playground, three of them waited for me, in order to ask more questions. I was genuinely impressed.

I have different presentations for different age groups and this time, I made some modifications to the primary school one, because these kids were 7 instead of 11 (like the last ones)

I want to share the changes that worked well for anyone planning a school talk for this age group soon. I:

1. swapped photos with cartoon like drawings (prompted by me, generated by AI ) and increased the number of illustrations 

2. limited the educational path to mentioning nowadays you can study architecture as an apprenticeship as well as at university and that you do not need to study architecture to shape the built environment

3. made any examples more relatable

4. I increased the opportunities for interaction

5. Used more straight forward words and paid attention to see if they needed me to explain any of the words I used better.

I know i keep saying it, but do get involved in Inspiring the Future and speak at your local schools. It is a lot of fun and they do welcome to the room with sentences as beautiful as :

"I am so happy that you are our mystery guest because we rarely have a mystery guest and we really enjoy it"

(the image below was the one i used to discuss the displacement of wildlife)