This programme for primary and secondary schools is designed to stimulate young people to create arts and crafts from scrap as a way of teaching them about materials reuse.

Competition: build a model boat

School children can use their upcycling skills in a new competition launched by Start Imagining. They simply have to transform reclaimed materials into a model boat in celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The winning team will get a trip to London to see their boats, which will be exhibited at the Old Royal Naval College throughout June.

Check out the Start Imagining website for more info on the competition and to download resource packs

Follow Start Imagining on Twitter for the latest news, or join the Start Imagining community on Facebook.

The WEEE Man at Eden

The WEEE Man sculpture is an example of how we’ve got creative with waste at Eden. He’s a 3.3-tonne structure that represents the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) the average British household throws away in a lifetime. Find out more about the WEEE Man.

Come along on Saturday 28 January 2012 to see them strut their stuff and give them support. As well as live dance and music performances, there’ll be creative writing readings, film screenings and an exhibition of the best photography and art from the Bright Young Things competition.

What’s more, under-18s can come into for free on the day to watch! If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions about the event, please email us at the Eden Project on brightyoungthings@edenproject.com or call us on 01726 811913.

Here’s a video of a previous Bright Young Things event to whet your appetite.

We’ve already shown you how to make a star and a Christmas tree decoration out of paper; now for an intricate spiral that looks lovely on the tree, in the window, or hung over the table for a festive occasion. It’s a nice easy thing to make with children on Christmas Eve.

For those of you really into origami, you’ll spot that this is in fact a kirigami decoration, because it involves cutting the paper. However you choose to call it, have fun experimenting with different colours and sizes.

You will need:

• A square of thin, coloured card
• A pair of scissors
• Double-sided tape, or a stapler
• A hole puncher
• A piece of thread

How to make your decoration

1. Fold your square of paper in half to form a triangle.
2. Then fold that triangle in half again to form a smaller triangle (figure 1).
3. Holding the triangle in one hand, use the scissors to cut a series of incisions into the triangle (through all the layers of folded paper) in parallel with the longest side. With each one, cut as far as you can before you reach the opposite edge of the triangle, but stop just before you get to it, leaving a solid seam all the way along that fold (figure 2). You can vary the space between each parallel cut to get a pretty effect.
4. Open up your piece of card into a square and it will look like a spider’s web pattern of cuts (figure 3). Place it so the incisions run like sideways arrows, left to right, and the solid ‘seam’ runs top to bottom.
5. Take hold of the two outermost corners, on the left and right, and bring them together to meet. Use double-sided tape to stick them to each other (a stapler works too, but the finished decoration isn’t quite as beautiful).
6. Then do the same with the next two corners in, but bring them together to meet on the opposite side of the card (figure 4).
7. Continue to do this until all the corners are paired up with each other, on alternate sides of the card, until you reach the core of the card (figure 5).
8. To hang your decoration, use a hole puncher to make a hole in the very top piece of solid card and tie some thread through it.

Luke Jerram’s ‘acoustic wind pavilion’ invites people to stand inside an arc of humming steel pipes which generate sound from the wind around them.

Named after Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind, the installation is ‘designed to make audible the silent shifting patterns of the wind and to visually amplify the ever changing sky’, explains Luke.

As well as hearing the sonified wind, which reverberates down 310 sensitive ‘whiskers’, visitors can look through these bright, polished tubes to see a magnified and inverted version of the landscape around them.

How to visit Aelous at Eden
Visitors can view Aeolus at the Eden Project from 19 September – 11 October as part of a national tour. It can be accessed from Pineapple car park, via a short walk through ‘Wild Chile’, one of our lesser known plant collections and conservation areas on the outer estate where there are 800 plants representing 60 different Chilean species, hybrids and varieties that are part of a conservation programme in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. Or for anyone with mobility problems it can be accessed via a more direct flat route starting at Strawberry Car Park.

Come along to one of our special talks on the acoustics that make Aeolus sing, delivered by a member of the project team. These take place by the sculpture itself at 11:00, 12:00, 14:00, 15:00, 16:00 on 23, 24, 28, 29 and 30 September, and 5 and 6 October.

See more photos of Aelous and find out how it was made.

Videos of Aeolus at Eden

The 10 AS-level students got the chance to explore the site with their cameras and come up with as many winning shots as possible.

After a personal tour with one of our Pollinators, our team that ‘pollinate’ people with ideas and stories, they were given a specific brief to try and capture the following aspects of Eden:

• Hidden Eden: textures, shapes and exhibits
• Horticulture: gardeners at work, people interacting with plants
• Kids’ eye view: playing, learning, discovering

Check out the results below! We’re really pleased – and it’s amazing to think that they have only been studying photography for a year.

We’ve loved having the students along because it helps us to see Eden with fresh eyes. And of course it’s been a great opportunity for them – to photograph an unusual place, get a feel for what it’s like to work in the industry with a brief and a deadline, and receive feedback on their portfolios at the end.

Captions, from top to bottom:

• Adam Kent spots a gecko in the Rainforest Biome
• Amrita Kalsey’s wildflowers
• The Malaysian Hut, by Charlotte Hudson
• A busy bee, by Emily McConville
• Emma Northcott captures a rare glimpse of the roul roul
• Evangeline Murt snaps Eden’s Nest climbing frame
• Harriet Rapier captures our Eve sculpture through the trees
• Jasmine Blackmoore captures a kid exploring our tropical biome
• John Scott picks out hidden detail
• One tired out kid, by Jake Woolcock

Chaired by journalist and co-founder of Instigate Debate, Mark Donne, your questions will be answered by a panel that includes oceanographer Simon Boxall, campaigner Chris Hines and musician and poet Dizraeli (above).

Young writers and film-makers have helped shaped this week’s debate through our associated Future Features competition. Andrea Michael submitted a winning written provocation, which will kickstart Thursday’s event, and Jessie Brickley created a two-minute film.

In it she draws attention to the prospect that, in 100 months’ time (from 1 August 2008), we could be beyond our climate’s ‘tipping point’ (ie at the point of no return). You can find out more about the 100 months countdown in this Guardian blog by Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation.

Watch Jessie’s film below to get you in the mood for Thursday’s debate.

The recycled shipping container currently on site at Eden as part of the nine-week Design of the Times (DOTT) Cornwall programme will feature a new exhibition from Saturday 26 March to Monday 25 April.

The Salt Dress Collection comprises a series of six hand-made silk dresses, screen and digitally printed with imagery inspired by Claire Armitage’s drawings of the winding streets of St Ives, the evocative hues of the Atlantic Ocean and the sweeping architectural lines of the Tate St Ives.

Claire specialises in designing and making bespoke dresses. She works as a freelance costume designer and is a lecturer in both fashion and textiles at University College Falmouth.

Find out more about DOTT Cornwall on this blog post or on the DOTT Cornwall website.

Inside ours, visitors can immerse themselves in a continuous wave of sound and light. Eleanor Bell and Matt Hocking’s ‘Wave Hub’ installation (below) is on until 20 March, after which Claire Armitage’s ‘Tate St Ives’ exhibit will take its place (26 March – 25 April). Her collection of gorgeous haboi silk dresses feature designs inspired by the Tate St Ives and its surroundings.

These recycled shipping containers are part of the nine-week Dott Cornwall programme, (standing for Design of the Times). The season celebrates the county’s creativity and ingenuity, exploring how design can help create a more sustainable and inclusive society. Find out more at www.dottcornwall.com

The lovely people at Sylvantutch, who make recycled furniture in the Welsh village of Corris, have given Eden a very special gift. They made a beautiful chair with reclaimed oak fence posts last year. Craftsman Nick Bullen, and his colleagues at Sylvantutch, hauled it up the Welsh mountain Cadair Idris and placed it near the summit as a place for walkers to rest. Local authorities then took exception to the positioning of the chair and ordered it back down the mountain.

Looking for a good home for the chair, Sylvantutch offered to donate it to Eden. They delivered it to our Wild Cornwall exhibit yesterday, where we accepted the gift with thanks and marked the occasion with a ceremony.

Find out more about what’s in our Outdoor Biome.

You can keep up to date on their progress throughout the night on the 24hr comic etc blog and Twitter. We’ll report on the fruits of their labour next week!

Today the artists have been joined by schoolchildren from three local schools: Newquay Junior Academy, Trenance Learning Academy and Newquay Tretherris School . The children have been producing artwork as part of a project to develop an iPhone app. This project aims to build the children’s understanding of art and design practice, and is part of the Manifesta Generation programme run by ProjectBase Cornwall.