Learn about our progress in supporting the establishment of repair initiatives in universities across the UK, a project in partnership with the Community Repair Network.
Education blog
We’re still working to make our schools programme as engaging and effective as possible. After launching our first programme at Archer Academy in London, we’re looking for new schools to roadtest our materials with.
If you’re affiliated with a school and interested in working with us, click here for a summary of the materials we have available so far. Or take a look at our blog below for updates about our work and reflections on its impact.
Teaching repair: educational resources for young people
It’s often said that repair skills are more common among older generations. Unless these skills are passed down, so the argument goes, we’re in danger of losing them entirely. Whether true or not, teaching the next generation about repair has never been more important. As the climate crisis deepens, repair can play a vital role […]
Guest post: How cleaning the dusty guts of my laptop changed my life
Designer Forrest Radford, who attended a Restart Party while a student five years ago, is now launching a repair-related Kickstarter campaign. He remembers “In less than an hour David had shown me the dusty guts of my Mac, we cleaned it out and put it back together; it booted like new.”
Jobs of the future, skills and sustainable consumption
Proprietary augmented reality (AR) software also offers up the possibility to outsource the troubleshooting and problem solving work in physical repairs – turn them more into mechanical, low-paid grunt work. We present the positive alternative.
Restart @school session 10: Future jobs plus a Restart Party
In our last session, we invited a guest speaker to talk about their tech job – and what they felt are some of the “ninja skills” of the future, given the trends of automation and climate change.
Restart @school session 9: Exploring the value of gadgets for reuse and recycling
Before launching into an “urban mining” session on raw materials and recycling, we emphasised that reuse always comes before recycling. Then we “mined” with students working to identify the elements and minerals in the parts.
Restart @school session 8: Creative problem solving and good design
We introduced creative problem solving, showing examples of physical and software-based work-arounds, like using assistive touch when a home button breaks. Then we brainstormed “bad” design from our experience fixing, and went through principles behind good design.
Restart @school session 7: Fault-finding
Many repairs are not so straight-forward. Fault-finding is often the greatest hurdle in a repair. We were rather nervous about this session – partly because over the years working with adults, what we’ve learned is that it is very difficult to teach