Lower Sixth art students had the opportunity to jump on a train to Birmingham last Thursday in order to take photographs and gain some inspiration for their next project. Whilst some students headed off on a tour of the most industrial and popular parts of the second city, the rest made the short journey from Moor Street station to the ThinkTank at Millennium Point. Personally, I chose this option due to the fond primary school memories I made there – and of course the photographic opportunities.

With three floors of discovery to explore, we disbanded into much smaller groups upon our arrival and set about filling our cameras with as many artistic-looking pictures as we possibly could. Beginning on the bottom floor, many of us ran around the large machines and the old locomotives, contorting ourselves into remarkable positions to get the perfect angle of the gears and the wheels. I found going inside a sizeable but stationary steam train perhaps the most entertaining element of this level – despite not being able to touch the important-looking buttons embedded into the metal, tempting as it was.

The second story of the building was my personal favourite, as it contained the much-loved ‘Kid City’, which I remember playing in whilst in primary school. Now that we are older, we were not allowed to enter, but we still managed to find plenty of interesting things to do and photograph before ascending the final set of stairs. There was an entire zoo’s worth of taxidermied animals, which I admittedly found rather eerie (the glassy eyes were perhaps the most unnerving feature). However, the medical section was tremendous fun, especially the mock-up exercise video featuring a little cartoon character who resembled an egg on legs. This particular part of the museum also hit a serious note, with a small segment dedicated to the rising issue of mental health issues in young people. That same character addressed body image and bullying which the ThinkTank’s target audience of the younger generations have to become more aware of in this day and age.

The final floor was dedicated to futuristic machinery and robotics – and we had great fun programming an arm-like robot to play terrible drum routines and we had wonderful conversations with an intellegent robot. The ‘Planetarium’ also inhabited this area, however we sadly could not enter without buying an extra ticket. I can imagine that would have been interesting to view, even if it did not relate to the purpose of our visit. In all honesty, not many purposeful images were captured.

The day came to a marvellous close with a few overpriced coffees, just before sitting in Moor Street station and waiting for our classmates to return from their tour of the city. Overall – it was a fabulous day which provided plenty of information and inspiration and I, for one, will not be short of reference for a long time.