DOMINIC WILCOX: When a child comes up with an idea
and it's really clever, it really gives me a buzz.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: The bouncy castle car.
DOMINIC WILCOX: This is a robot spoon.
An odd sock sorter.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: We really think
that children have the best ideas because they do not have
any limits to their thinking.
They don't think about what is possible, what is not possible.
DOMINIC WILCOX: To take children's ideas seriously,
I think it really gives them a self-confidence
to keep on going and inventing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Dominic Wilcox.
I'm an artist and designer and the chief inventor
at Little Inventors.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: And I'm Katherine Mengardon,
chief educator at Little Inventors.
DOMINIC WILCOX: Little Inventors is a project
to find amazing ideas.
And we do that by asking children
to use their brilliant, free imagination
to come up with their invention ideas and draw them down.
And then we ask local makers and manufacturers,
skilled scientists to take seriously
the most interesting ideas and turn them
into real things for exhibition.
The world has many problems and challenges, as we know.
And we need a lot more inventive thinkers
to solve those problems.
And in order to do that, we've got
to encourage young people to start thinking of those ideas,
to look around at the world, and find problems that they'd
come up with ideas to solve.
I think what I like about the word
"invention" or "inventor" is that it's a very friendly word.
It's a fun word in a way.
So it welcomes people from the artistic side
and also, people from the science side.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: Because drawing
is a very natural things for children to do,
it's much easier to express your ideas through drawing,
often much easier than using words
for a lot of the children.
DOMINIC WILCOX: That is really the shortest distance
between the child's imagination and us.
And then we can take it seriously and push it further
than a simple model.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: The way we work
is we create challenges for schools generally,
or for museums, or for organizations.
The principle remains always the same--
we want to invite children to draw invention ideas.
And then the best ones, the ones that we call the most ingenious
ideas, we ask makers or designers and artists
to bring them to life.
DOMINIC WILCOX: So we'll choose a particular subject matter.
We've done food waste, for example.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: We love the idea by Rumaan.
You could have this alarm cup.
You could program it by saying, in five days,
I need the alarm to tell me to eat the fruit.
So you put it in there.
And then you know exactly when you have to eat the fruit.
DOMINIC WILCOX: In Canada, we're doing what it
would be like living in space.
There's all different types of ideas,
like a moon roller coaster.
You know, I think this is a brilliant idea.
We need inventions to help people live on the moon.
But we also need a bit of fun.
And so over the last couple of weeks,
I've been working on making it.
The child is the client.
So it's sort of changing the dynamic.
We're looking up to the children.
I really love the idea of the collaboration
element of this project.
It's important that the children describe their invention
to the makers.
Quite often, they'll visit the makers
and learn how things are made.
Thomas, he came up with a worry shredder.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: It's a box.
It's got cards on the top.
And you can write your worries.
And it's got a shredder in it, so you just put it through.
And then it sort of prints out words of wisdom for you
on how to deal with worries.
And then you can even get a chocolate at the end.
THOMAS: I decided to invent this so I can get over my worries
and to try and make other people happy.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: Children look around them.
They see things, and they want to respond to it.
And they often do not have any ways to do so.
You can really apply this lens of invention
and really give them a way of sort of thinking,
this is how I can bring my own voice to this.
EMMA: Basically, it's like a zoomer
frame for, like, old people.
And it detects like, cars and stuff,
like when people cross the road.
Some people in my family, they can't really see very well.
So they have trouble crossing roads and stuff.
And now I'm trying to do more things like it.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: So we have about 10,000 inventions
on the website.
DOMINIC WILCOX: We accept the bonkers crazy ideas as well as
the perfectly practical ones.
MAJA: It's just like a walker for people
that don't like walking, but they like eating sweets.
I invented it for my sister to stop moaning.
And now she's stopped moaning.
It's good now.
She stopped moaning.
But she still moans though.
I have to get another invention to stop her
from moaning even more.
DOMINIC WILCOX: That is really one
of the aims of little inventors.
Hopefully encouraging children to gain
a passion for invention.
KATHERINE MENGARDON: Emily is autistic.
She's got sensory overload, really.
So loud noises can be a real problem for her.
But equally, she doesn't want to be noticed.
She thought that she could have these replacement
ears that would provide her with a bit of quiet.
After all this, we received a fantastic message
from her parents, who said having
done that gave her real confidence in her own ideas.
Apparently, we can't really shut her up these days,
so there we go.
DOMINIC WILCOX: Invention and creativity is--
it's like a muscle.
And if you stop using it, if you stop doing it,
you lose it in a way.
And that's the thing about creativity.
That's why it's so important to encourage children
to be creative, and then get it through to adulthood,
where they can really do things that make the world
a better place.