Green Gown Awards 2021: Benefitting Society - Newcastle University - Winner

Climate Change Catastrophe! - a new show about climate change, made by kids, for grown-ups

What do kids think about climate change? Can school children develop the engineering solutions to one of society’s biggest challenges? Climate Change Catastrophe! is a theatre project developed jointly between Cap-a-Pie and Newcastle University’s School of Engineering that will give you inspiring perspectives on one of the biggest challenges of our time - climate change. It’s all about what children think about climate change – their hopes, fears, and ideas for the future. The show was released as a six-part online series in May 2021.

To make this show, scientists and engineers at Newcastle University worked with hundreds of Key Stage 2 students from across the North of England as well as theatre company Cap-a-Pie. Ideas were shaped together, based on research in the School of Engineering and interactive activities. Everything you see in the show has been informed by, inspired by, or is directly from ideas from children.

Top 3 learnings:

• We learnt the importance of partnership working across academic, creative, and community sectors.
• We discovered that creative arts organisations are vital to communicating complex engineering ideas.
• Our engineers learnt that children have freedom of imagination to think up crazy climate solutions!