Shared by Peter Kraftl
(How) can we use LEGO to think through questions of energy and climate change? The University of Birmingham part of the Climate Action Network team has been collaborating with local organisations to think through questions of energy in/and climate change. We have been working with staff and pupils at St Paul’s Community Development Trust, exploring ‘energy’ through artistic, creative and experimental encounters. This week, we visited ThinkTank science museum in Birmingham, which engages children with technologies past, present and future. We built wind turbines from LEGO and tested them using powerful fans. This afforded a sense of the embodied energies – the work – that goes into building renewable energy technologies. We experimented with wind energy – adjusting our wind turbines, and our bodies, to maximise the electrical energy produced (visible through light bulbs attached to the turbines). We then reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of wind power. However, we also need to ask ourselves – what are the opportunities, trade-offs and, especially, the tensions involved in using plastics to address climate change…and (how) can we overcome these?
Peter I love your work but why lego
why plastic blocks? Why Support for creation of more landfill? And why promotion of a billion dollar multinational?
Dear Peter,
Thank you for sharing your work and your approach and your own awareness of strengths and weakness. I love the fact that you are using an actual game to engage learning to find solutions to some of the most prominent problems humanities faces nowadays. Louise, I also echo your comment in a sense that there more sustainable games that can teach lessons. I strongly believe in the capacity of the Go (the oldest game in human civilisation) to bridge these games, arts and science. I have been using Go successfully in my education practice and have found a lot of transferable skills, both “hard” and ” soft” – perhaps we could turn back to see what has worked for 4 millennia to find solutions to todays problems.