How Things Have Changed!

Remember a phone with a round dial? A phone box with a coin slot? A camera where you looked through the top? A manual typewriter? And before that a quill?

A trip to MOTAT was a great source of inspiration for our aspiring Year 3 inventors at the Boys’ School; discovering that the course of human creative endeavour can take many varied and unpredictable paths to discover a final outcome.

The Year 3 boys have been studying inventors and the impact they have had on daily lives as part of their social science inquiry. In class, they researched famous inventions and technological developments that have taken place over the lifetime of their parents and grandparents. The boys were fascinated to learn that bread was once sold unsliced, motor mowers haven’t always been motorised and milk came in glass bottles, and was delivered to your house!

The theme of the past informing the present, and the future, was continued on their trip to the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT). In the MOTAT classroom, the boys were encouraged to think about what an invention is and what might inspire someone to take a course of action to invent something new. By matching old products with newer ones that serve the same function, such as a candle and lamp or ink quill and typewriter, they saw how inventions have developed over time. They also learnt about the difference between invention and innovation by examining the multitude of shapes and sizes that cameras and telephones have taken over the years, to the point where, today, the two are combined!

Judging by the fervent discussions taking place on the bus back to school, the trip definitely gave the boys food for thought ready to put their thinking hats on for their own inventions!