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I'm Jonathan Hare. I'm a freelance scientist and science communicator. So I'm here today to do a windmill workshop, so we’re getting the kids to assemble a windmill. So they have to understand basically what a windmill does. So it converts wind energy into electricity in this case.

And then they’ve got three challenges. They have to make a little buzzer work, which is easy. They have a torch. So we give them a torch without any batteries - so they have to use the wind energy to power the torch. And then they get a little treasure box, and I've designed the treasure boxes so it’s got a little LCD screen in it, and when they get enough electricity the screen slowly types out, on the screen, where the key is for the treasure box, and then they can open the treasure box and get the treasure, which is chocolate, but I don’t tell them that.

The different things depend on the amount of energy that the windmills are producing?

The energy you get from a windmill, the actual power, is dependent on the wind speed, cubed. So, in other words, if you double the wind speed you get two times two times two, you get eight times the power. And actually the wind does go up and down, and it can easily go up by a factor of two and down by a factor of two, and so your energy’s going up and down by factors of a hundred effectively, so the energy’s very irregular.

So sometimes they work very hard to even get the torch to work, and then in some locations we get everything working really well, and, in that case, what we do is we join the three windmills we've got together and we power a radio, and they can listen to the radio, with the local radio station, which is great. So we've got something, hopefully, to suit every location, even when they haven't got much wind. We've got some wobble boards here, which they can use to try and make their own wind.

We saw you earlier trying to get it working outside, is it still quite calm out there?

Yes, you can see the flags, they're hardly moving at all so this is the worst situation for a windmill. But, you know, it’s good because the kids will make this windmill, they understand that it works. But they also understand that you can’t just put one of these in every house in Britain and solve the energy problems because they're not going to do anything half the time. Unless you live in Lewis in Scotland, you know, where there's a constant supply of beautiful wind. Here there's not a lot of wind so they're not useful, in this particular situation, you need some other form of energy.

And what kind of people have you been talking to today, sort of all ages or is it generally the younger people who show more interest?

Yes, well I've designed it for families, so obviously, with the treasure box, it’s meant for kids, but the adults and the parents can get involved making the wind, using the wobble boards, so there's something for everyone. And, in this particular location, because we’re in a museum, it’s quite a short workshop so we can do it in ten minutes, if we need to, or a quarter of an hour.

But in other locations where we've got a screen, and we've got the kids in quite large numbers, then we can show clips from the series. We can discuss them: about wave power, wind power and all the other energies, and then get them to make it, and then bring them back and discuss what the good and bad parts were about it. And so we can lengthen the workshop to an hour and really get an awful lot out of it. So it’s a bit shorter today but they still get an idea of the pros and cons of wind power.

And the actual constructions, you’ve brought a kit in effect, but there are sort of variables there presumably depending on the complexity and perhaps the age of the participant?

Yes, so I've sort of designed it for eight to twelve-year-olds but actually we've had three and four-year-olds. In fact, I even, on one workshop, had an 18-month-old kid, and the parent wrote a very sweet thing saying, 'Thank you for allowing my 18-month-old child to assemble the windmills'.

Yes, so because we've got limited time, we've basically got a ready made windmill which they construct. And they can put eight blades on the windmill, they can choose the length of the blades, obviously the bigger the blades are the more wind it’s going to pick up, but it’s also heavier.

And then they need to adjust the angle of the blades, because obviously if the blades have got very little area looking into the wind, they're not going to interact much with the wind. But if you're full on, they won’t go anywhere, they just bend. So you need to have a slight angle so that it pushes it round.

So, yes, we've got number of blades, angle of the blades and the size of the blades, and those three variables allow us to get as much power as we can, to power the three different devices.

And you say you’ve been to different locations with the roadshow, I mean how’s it all gone? Did you get out of it what you think you should have done?

Yes, I mean I've been surprised how young some of the kids have been, everyone’s really enjoyed it. I think the lure of the treasure in the treasure boxes makes an enormous difference. Some of the kids get so excited, ‘Yeah treasure’, and so that’s been delightful.

What I am going to do, in the next design, I'm going to actually build into the treasure box three little buttons, so that actually the treasure box asks them questions before they get the treasure. So, you know, you could have, what does a windmill need, does it need water, wind or light? They have to press the right button, then it takes them on to another question, then finally it tells them where the key is for the treasure box. So I've learned that.

But what's amazed me is how little wind there has been in the coastal towns, been all over the place, and on some days you could literally drop a feather and it would just fall right down, there was no wind at all.

Then you’ve got the other problem, I mean the Coast series showed this, that you’ve got places like Lewis, the Isle of Lewis, which has got fantastic wind, and they're planning this incredible array of massive, forty metre windmills, and it’s going to completely change the island. I mean, on the programme it’s almost something similar to the length of the centre of London, you know, it’s not just a few hundred square metres. It’s an enormous area that it’s covering, which is going to dramatically change that island, and I guess the locals think ruin it, and that’s a problem.