The Imagination Lab is a space where children and adults can explore new ideas, invent new products and build new skills for the future. With each event we run, it transforms to meet varying needs, discover current themes and combat world challenges. Take a look at what a visit to the Imagination Lab is like with this ‘day in the life’ tour of two of our recent events.

Lab Live: Why oh Why? with OKIDO

Can robots clean the planet? How do creatures live in the sea? What are our bodies made of?

For this special two-day event at the Imagination Lab, we welcomed over 1,000 young inventors and their families to explore a host of important questions just like these ones.

Lab Live: Why oh Why? with OKIDO demonstrated how combining STEAM subjects can help children to use and stretch their imaginations for creative and inventive outcomes.

We partnered with over 20 makers to help run activities across science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.

Children worked together throughout the day to create a giant collaborative art mural in partnership with Square Egg, an illustration collective. Using coloured paper and art supplies, visitors made their own imaginative creatures and decided which habitat the creature should live in when they added it to the mural.

Using Hexbug robots, we explored what colour coding is and how it can be used to move and control the creatures. Each line of colour drawn on the paper relates to a certain command. For example, drawing a black line will instruct the robot to turn around, where as drawing a red line will tell the robot to emit a red light. Children used the pens to code a series of actions for the robot and make them move across the paper in whichever way they imagined.

What can make maths educational and entertaining? Balloons! BubblyMaths were on hand to build giant balloon structures with children, to teach them about geometric shapes and how shapes can fit together.

As always, we were thrilled to see parents and children alike getting involved in the activities and testing their imaginations:

“Thoughtful, inspiring, spontaneous yet organised – looking forward to the next events already”

“What a fantastic day – we have a very happy 5-year-old” 

“The kids had an absolutely amazing time! We could have easily spent another whole day there!”

Lab Life: Making Mechanisms (Lambeth Community Programme)

Mechanisms are all around us. They make our lives and jobs easier, often without us consciously recognising them. At Lab Life: Making Mechanisms, families explored the crossover between engineering, art and science by creating their own automata and sorting, vending and dispenser machines.

Teaming up with Fire The Inventor, the Imagination Lab was taken over by colourful moving mechanisms, made from constructed components, a box of curious junk and dismantled toys.

Children (and adults too!) combined their artistic and mechanical skills to design an individual automata.

Every automata was linked together to form a strange and amazing snaking line of machines, eight meters long and powered by an electric motor.

Through the process of building this giant collaborative automaton, visitors learnt about cams, drives, linkages and how art can be (sometimes weirdly) engineered.

Lab Life: Making Mechanisms was a free workshop for Lambeth residents, delivered as part of our Lambeth Community Programme.

Join us at the Imagination Lab 

Whether we’re running an event for 500 visitors or 50, there is always so much to explore at the Imagination Lab to get your brain whirring and tinkering away. Come and experience a day at the Imagination Lab for yourself – take a look at our upcoming events.