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Growing up, I didn’t want to be an engineer, I wanted to be a lawyer. In fact, I didn’t really know what engineering was. It was only when I had to pick an engineering course for one of my GCSE exams that I first encountered it. Selecting a course in resistant materials, my teacher challenged me to create a project to enable those with limited mobility to use the stairs. My StairSteady solution was very simple: it was essentially a perpendicular bar that uses friction to allow users to pull themselves up or down safely. With the project finished, my school put me forward for the Young Engineer for Britain 2006 award.
Despite having won this prestigious engineering award I was still planning on studying law. It was only when I started meeting more engineers, particularly female engineers, through further awards StairSteady received that my view of engineering and who engineers are began to change. The more I looked into it, the more I thought this is the career for me and why was it never on my radar as an option? So I changed my A-levels with a view to studying engineering at university.
But when it came to it I chose to put off university for a few years, instead concentrating on bringing StairSteady to market. While I’ve grown the product into a successful company that is now sold across the world and gained a few more awards along the way, at the time I was just 18 with no business experience. It’s been quite a journey from those early days working off a laptop on my parents’ dining-room table. I’ve learned a lot and 14 years later I’m still learning. Whenever I’m asked about launching a new product, my advice always is to test your ideas and prove the concept by building physical prototypes. And then just to take it a step at a time.
I consider myself to be a mechanical engineer even though I have no professional qualification beyond A-levels. The path I chose to take and knowing how close I came to not being an engineer (and realising I would have been a terrible lawyer), I’ve made it my mission to raise awareness of engineering amongst young people, especially primary-school children as this is the age they start forming ideas about their future careers. Whatever their background, gender or ethnicity, I want them to realise that engineering can be for them and not miss out on an exciting career like I nearly did.
From talking to young people, I’ve discovered there is a lot of stigma and stereotyping around engineering, not to mention confusion as to what it is. For this reason, I refer to engineering as inventing. Being inventive makes it seem exciting. After all, it is about solving problems and creating solutions. The only inventor I ever saw as a child was Doc from Back to the Future, so let’s reclaim being an inventor.
Determined to change perceptions about engineering, my friend Shawn and I started to hatch a plan. Shawn was Young Engineer for Britain a few years after I was and, over the years, we’d regularly meet up at various engineering events and always talk about how we wanted to get the next generation excited about engineering by showing how fun and inventive it is. We put that talking into action and launched our YouTube channel Kids Invent Stuff in January 2017. The premise is that kids aged 4 to 11 send in their invention ideas and we’ll build them. Just about every month since we’ve brought a kid’s idea to life, ranging from a popcorn-firing doorbell to a seven-foot dinosaur that mops the floor. Today, Kids Invent Stuff has more than 46,000 subscribers and has had over two million views.
Whether children engage with us online or meet us in person at a school assembly, invention workshop or an exhibition, they are always brimming with creative ideas to solve problems. They don’t see the impossibilities like an adult would. It’s real blue-sky thinking that we need to nurture and keep going. In today’s world we have some pretty big problems that need solving.
I’m a person who gets bored easily and so at any one time I’m always involved in many projects. If I can learn something new along the way that’s great but if I can help inspire someone else all the better. So as well as StairSteady and Kids Invent Stuff, I get involved in public speaking, curating exhibitions, judging awards, working as a consultant for various organisations including governments, hosting a podcast, and being an ambassador for various programmes. I’ve even started up a few initiatives, such as Women in Welding, a campaign I set up with Lincoln Electric in 2021 to teach women how to weld. I believe that hands-on experiences can benefit all ages, they are vital to understanding how the world around us works.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.