Anaïs Engelmann, Co-Founder of Team Repair: “Tackling e-waste by teaching kids how to fix by showing them how real products work”

Anaïs Engelmann is on a repair mission. Together with two other award-winning engineers, Megan Hale and Oscar Jones, she co-founded Team Repair to spark the curiosity of children by giving them hands-on experience of real-world repair.

While the emphasis is on repair, Team Repair is also there to help spur interest in STEM subjects. It teaches school children vital skills in building and engineering, focusing on diagnosis, debugging and troubleshooting. All fantastic STEM skills.

Team Repair’s methods expose children to repair’s critical importance within the framework of sustainability, e-waste and the circular economy. They double down on this important message by making circularity key to their business operation. Once a school has finished with Team Repair’s kits, they are collected, checked and then re-sent to other schools.

In this interview, Anaïs shares her passion that repair should be a cornerstone of our education system and how Team Repair can influence businesses outside of the classroom.

Why did three engineers from Imperial College decide to bring repair into the classroom?

We were in the same group. In our final year, we had to create a startup around sustainable development, and we wanted to do something around responsible consumption.

We saw there were companies that take waste and create something, so we looked at it more upstream. How can we tackle it from a behavioural and systemic approach?

Our focus became teaching kids how to fix and somewhere around the brainstorming we said we could just send kids broken stuff and they fix it as a way of learning. The three of us are all engineers and what got us into that when we were young was seeing how things work and taking things apart. We married the ideas of tackling e-waste by teaching kids how to fix, but also getting more kids interested in STEM by showing how real products work.

Tell me about the STEM repair kits which you supply to schools? How do you select the devices for children to repair?

We have four products currently: a games console, a remote control car, a wind-up torch and a microscope.

Crucially, we want something which, once fixed, has a fun output so that they can associate repair with that really satisfying, enjoyable moment at the end.

As we sell to schools mostly, we look at the curriculum and what science topics we want to teach. We’ll pair up interesting skills, interesting products and interesting educational points.

For example, with our games console kit, they have to reattach a ribbon cable and reconnect some wires. The lessons are all around circuits, electricity and battery polarity. The repair skills we teach are how to test components before you put it back together, how to reattach wires, things like that.

Why are Team Repair’s STEM kits different?

There are a lot of STEM kits on the market, but most are the kind you build once, play with it for a bit and then throw it away. We really didn’t want to do that. 

We’re teaching kids how to reduce their e-waste, so creating more seems counterintuitive. From early doors, the idea was we send it to a kid, then they send it back when they’ve fixed it so we can send it to someone else.

Our activities get them thinking about sustainability. With our games console box, we have an activity which we give them different repairability factors to think about. How easy is something to disassemble? How easy is it to find the spare parts or to find the repair manuals? We get them to do it for the console and rate all of those different factors, and then to look at products around the house or around the school and to give that same rating.

Where do you source the contents of your repair kits?

We currently source them from manufacturers. The original idea was to take e-waste but we spent months talking with big names and they were very hesitant because we weren’t big enough.

We then customise them so that they are repairable – things like replacing cables with connectors, putting safety features into the electronics like diodes so that there’s no risk of anything heating up if something’s wrongly connected.

We do that initial customisation of the gadget and then we circulate it upwards of ten times between different schools and students.

Now we’re working with the manufacturers for them to implement the changes, so we’re showing manufacturers how to make their products more durable.

Which age range are your kits aimed at?

We’re ages ten to 14, that’s Year Five to Year Nine.

The reason we targeted younger to start off with is because there are a lot of studies that show that if you don’t capture the attention or the interest of young people, especially girls, before the age of 12, then there’s a huge drop off. They lock up, they’re just not interested and so by the time you get to GCSE and they’re choosing subjects, it is already too late.

What have been your biggest challenges in getting access to the classroom? How can you demonstrate added value to the school?

Budget and time for teachers because there’s so many staff shortages and they have such a wide curriculum to cover.

We’ve been figuring out how to make that work and with the schools that pay us directly, about 50% of them are state, 50% private.

I think it’s just about really showing the value, explaining that they can use this for this many lessons. We’ve designed it purposefully to take as little lesson planning time for teachers as possible. We provide all the training, the teacher materials, presentations and worksheets. Once they’re done, we arrange a collection, and the kit comes back to us. That model actually works really well and means that we’ve been able to scale up a lot faster.

How have the children responded to the kits?

In the past year we’ve had around 4,200 students do the kits and we measure changes in attitudes and behaviours by giving them a survey before and after.

60% say they’re more likely to repair something or they have a higher confidence in repair after doing the sessions. Around 25% said they were more interested in STEM or looking at a STEM job later on. The stats have been really promising.

How can you get into more schools?

We’ve been working with councils and private organisations who fund schools, so around 50% of our customers are the schools paying directly, the other 50% is either council funding or private company funding.

In a lot of sectors, we’re solving a problem for them. For councils, we’re tackling their circular economy and net zero scopes but also presenting it to get more kids interested in STEM. This helps local business as industrial strategy plans.

Have you discussed other way to grow the business?

Yes. Council budgets are also tight, so we’re working with organisations to provide a great way to tackle social responsibility.

We’re working with a waste management company as their social value partner, so they can put us into their bids to appeal to councils.

We’re also working with engineering firms, because we are providing them a way to get a workforce further down the line. We’re saying, if you put this in schools, then ten years later, there’ll be a much larger STEM workforce ready to work for you.

Are you optimistic about the future? Can the UK build a sustainable repair economy?

I think you have to be optimistic. We’ve been working a lot with the Restart Project and ran a repair cafe in UK Parliament.

We’ve always said that we’re taking a bottom-up approach, so we’re putting the skills there, but we need that top-down side to work with us. People are ready to repair and it just needs to be enforced by legislation. Look at the US, look at the EU, the UK is a little bit behind, but I think everything’s slowly going in the right direction.

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