SE1 students win Design Museum prize for reinventing tiddlywinks

The Walworth Academy pupils were this week named as winners of Design Ventura, a design award that develops student creativity and enterprise skills, at a celebration event hosted by Sebastian Conran at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

'Slick Shooter' takes its inspiration from the traditional tiddlywinks, creating a cleverly designed, marketable and portable product which can be assembled from a piece of plastic the size of a credit card. The pupils' aim was to design a game that encourages young teenagers to play as a group.

The winning team receives a £1,000 bursary and a five-day programme of workshops and guidance from professional designers to develop the game, which will be sold exclusively in the Design Museum shop this summer.

Design Ventura is a three-year education initiative for 14-16 year olds. It was launched by the Design Museum in May 2010 and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

"Put an imaginative creative youngster in a seemingly empty room and soon they will come out with something they have made," said Sebastian Conran.

"On the face of it the 'Slick Shooter' may look like a tiddlywinks hybrid, but it is really the sophistication of the game-play, rules and playground league where the design thinking is most evident."

Another SE1 school also made the shortlist for Design Ventura: pupils at Globe Academy devised the Curva Light, a self-assembly user-configurable chandelier.