By Ian Coates

Last updated 11:48, Friday, 19 September 2008

In this scientific age with all the resources of game consoles and computer access, have the same resources become surrogates for their own imagination?

As a child, I created all kinds of vehicles to ride on from old prams and push chairs. Even an old skateboard ended up as steering for a go kart. In my teens a cousin and I built a go kart from a Ford Transit back axle we found in the river. We called it the ‘Beast’.

Looking back, I realise it was a potential death trap. It took around four of us to push it up any decent hill because of its weight but other kids would swarm over it wanting a ride on it. It had two ‘safe’ car seats inside the timber ‘safety’ frame but we often had seven or more passengers. It once rolled over coming down Tebay fell road and there were lots of cuts, grazes and even a fractured hand. Happy days. I suppose that could be a little extreme.

The point I’m making is that it was an activity that got the adrenalin going, it made us feel alive and gave hours of fun in not only riding the ‘Beast’ but in creating it, solving the problems that test drives produced.

How do we stop it? is a pretty obvious problem to an adult, not so much to two 13-year-olds who were more concerned with test drives than stopping. The fear of almost crashing into a car with our ‘Beast’ was the incentive for change.

It was trial and error, experience driving imagination. I’m not saying that all children lack vision and imagination, far from it.

But with the games and computers that are created from someone else’s imagination, is it stifling their own creativity and leaving them without the tools for a happier adulthood.

Imagination is one of the ways that people can cope with lots of stresses and strains of life itself. Albert Einstein said that “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” In a world of knowledge perhaps we are missing something?