Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Young, gifted and talented (13 Apr 2005) Children from different schools and different boroughs are brought together in two ways: through live events and e-communities, in which children share messages on an online discussion board. Usually, says Ian, the two work best in combination with each other. In one example, a group of 35 pupils met civil engineers and surveyors and designers from the rail company Crossrail, to find out about the challenges of designing an underwater station - a brief that Crossrail had been given for Canary Wharf. After the meeting, the pupils went away and worked on the problem in an e-community. "Every third week they came back to meet live again, shared their ideas with the designers and asked new questions. At the end they did a big presentation to all the Crossrail directors, explaining why they'd done what they'd done. It was a chance for these kids to get a lot of input, but also to work in an e-community to develop a real world solution to a real world problem," says Ian. Article URL: http://www.nestafuturelab.org/viewpoint/art47.htm Read 122 more articles from NESTA Futurelab sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: CHI 2005: Randy Pausch sells Interdisciplinarity as the Key to the Big Issues     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy