Women will be to the fore at Engineering Day
Oban’s new Lego Club will be themed on the Year of Engineering this weekend.
The Master Builders: Lego and Creative Construction Club only started a few months ago, but people have already donated piles of Lego bricks from their attics and cupboards, and it now attracts 65 children and adults every second and fourth Saturday at Oban’s Rockfield Centre from 10am to noon.
Last month it bought even more Lego thanks to £2,500 from the Supporting Communities Fund.
Themes so far have ranged from World Oceans Day and National Train Day to International Women in Engineering Day this Saturday, June 23.
The club is inviting two engineers to guide the session: Karen Wilson, who operates marine robotics at SAMS, and Fiona-Ann Vick, from the Northern Lighthouse Board.
Karen trained as an aircraft engineer with the Royal Navy, doing both electrical and mechanical maintenance on Lynx helicopters, before retraining in marine science at SAMS.
She said: ‘We are unusual (and lucky) here at SAMS that the majority of our robotics technicians are female.’
Fiona-Ann served her as a plant fitter at Cruachan Power Station, before working as a fabricator making fish farm cages for Fusion Marine, and then becoming a lighthouse electrical technician.
Lego Club organiser Fee Shaw said: ‘I decided to hold a special Women in Engineering Day because my three-year-old son had made an innocent remark when we were playing Lego at home and I had selected a female Lego figure to play a scientist in our game and he remarked that only boys were scientists or engineers or fire fighters and so on, because that is all he had seen on TV and in books.
‘I set about trying to explain why that simply wasn’t true. Not only can women do any of those careers but they are often leaders in their fields. I realised that to a child the best way for them to accept these truths is to see them rather than simply be told they exist.
‘So I have invited some local female engineers to come and talk to the children about what they do and how they got their positions, as well as giving the children a chance to play with some robots and engineering circuit sets.
‘For me, Women in Engineering Day is about acknowledging the fantastic work these women do and making sure they are visible to be an inspiration to children, to show them science, technology, engineering and mathematics roles are for both men and women.’