Familiar Materials                                  vs.                    Purpose Built Equipment

Household equipment and recycled materials are not just cheaper to use and easier to find, but they have enormous educational benefits over their pre-packaged counterparts. Some of these are listed below:

1. Familiarise children with the possibility of reuse. This can have both great environmental benefits as well as making for a very satisfying outcome. When repair around The Lighthouse involves the cannibalization of parts from something broken, it is celebrated much more than those which require the installation of a shop-bought 'spare part'.
2. The behaviour of an invention, model or construction can easily be understood as we are already familiar with its 'everyday' components.
3. However the material is used, it will relate to us, as we have already experienced it in a previous incarnation.
4. If we use the same materials in different contexts then we can begin to see the underlying function of a particular component (i.e. using a garden tap as a valve in a fermentation chamber).

See a list of some of the workshops that are run using natural materials.