A crack team of professional organisers descended on The National Museum of Computing to help prepare for the popular family-friendly Winter Bytes Festival.
As part of their donate-a-day to charity tradition for National Organising Week, eight members of the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers (APDO) tackled the challenge of sorting out the museum’s electronic Lego parts before moving on to help clean and categorise some computer components of decades ago.
Lisa Pantling of APDO said, “I go to work to get away from a Lego at home and was rather surprised to face it in a computing museum! But I quickly learned how popular it is at the museum’s Bytes Festivals and how Lego helps to develop creative computer thinking in young minds.
Imagine having a family numbering well into double figures playing Lego over many sessions and you can probably guess the task they faced!
“Our members specialise in many areas, from hoarding behaviour to home staging, interior design and business productivity,” Lisa continued. “The Museum day turned out to be a lot of fun and needed to be fuelled only by coffee, cake and lots of laughs.”
Liz Aitken, of Carefully Sorted, was particularly pleased to be part of the group working at the Museum as her grandfather, Professor Alexander Aitken, had worked on Bletchley Park as a mathematician, statistician and cryptographer.
On behalf of TNMOC, Jacqui Garrad expressed her delight with the result of the expert declutterers’ work: “It is such a relief to have the Lego back in order for the Winter Bytes family festival. And we had the bonus of careful cleaning of the fascinating vintage exhibits that visitors love to browse outside the Innovation Hub. Let’s hope we don’t have to call them back too soon.”
Christmas Bytes with the Lego and many more family activities runs from 27-29 December 2019.
