Case-study

Build a Bamboo Bike: our challenge for 100 young people with We Job Box

Employability Programme | Virtual campus | October 2025 Our first We Job Box session — a sustainability challenge run twice to 100 college students aged 16–18, alongside challenges set by Rolls-Royce SMR and Bosch.

James Marr 27 August 2026 · 1 min read

A row of finished bamboo-framed bicycles outside the workshop

On 29 October 2025 we set a challenge to 100 young people at once: could you design a bike that is strong, good-looking — and made from a plant?

The event

It was the Green and Sustainability day of the We Job Box Immersive Accelerator — work experience delivered on a virtual campus, where young people work in groups on real challenges set by real employers rather than sitting through careers talks. The audience was college students aged 16 to 18, including students from BMET College in Birmingham.

We ran our challenge twice, to groups of fifty. The other challenges that day came from Rolls-Royce SMR, who asked how you win public trust for a new kind of clean energy, and Bosch, who asked what it really takes for a global company to reach net zero. Good company for an argument about growing your materials instead of mining them.

A row of finished bamboo-framed bicycles — The challenge in one line: could you design a bike that is strong, good-looking — and made from a plant?

The challenge itself

Ours was Build a Bamboo Bike. In an hour, teams had to think outside the frame: how bamboo behaves as an engineering material, what it can and cannot do, and how you would design a bicycle around its strengths rather than pretending it is steel.

The point is never really the bike. It is that a material most people associate with garden canes turns out to be a legitimate engineering choice — and that noticing this, and arguing for it, is what engineers actually do.

A bamboo frame being built in a jig — A frame coming together in the jig — the process the challenge asks students to reason about.

Why we do these

A bamboo bicycle is a good way into sustainability because nothing about it is abstract. The material grew. The frame gets built by the person who rides it. Every trade-off is visible.

This was the first of four sessions we have now delivered with We Job Box. It led directly to the next.

Part of our work with We Job Box: the green day challenge (Oct 2025) · sustainability & entrepreneurship (Feb 2026) · applied psychology at Aston (Jun 2026) · a design sprint with the University of Surrey (Jun 2026).