Jimmy Johnston MBE

Jimmy Johnston MBE has spent most of his life helping young people discover that they are capable of rather more than they first imagined.

His own journey into engineering began in Glasgow in 1966, when he started work as a scientific instrument maker. It gave him an engineer's appreciation for precision, making things properly, understanding why something works and, perhaps most importantly, finding out why it doesn't.

But Jimmy eventually discovered that his real vocation was not simply making things. It was helping young people learn how to make, design, question and solve things for themselves.

He began teaching in 1977 and went on to become Head of Technology Education in 1990. Over a career spanning decades in Glasgow schools, his classroom extended far beyond the school gates.

Jimmy believed young people should experience engineering as something real.

His Young Engineers teams travelled internationally to meet, compete and collaborate with other young people, including visits to the United States for Technology Student Association events in the 1990s and exchanges and engineering experiences in Australia in the years that followed. These were not simply school trips. They were opportunities for young people to discover that where they came from did not determine how far they could go.

Many of Jimmy's former pupils went on into engineering, technology and other STEM careers.

His commitment to young people also existed long before and far beyond his professional teaching life. At eighteen he joined the Boys' Brigade as a volunteer staff member and within two years had become Captain of a unit. It began a lifelong commitment to what Jimmy simply describes as "giving back to society."

Over the years he also volunteered through youth organisations, school sport, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award and Rotary.

That lifetime of service was formally recognised when Jimmy was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Education and Young People, following his inclusion in the New Year Honours announced on 31 December 2004. His investiture took place at Buckingham Palace in June 2005, where he received the honour from Queen Elizabeth II.

Yet the idea that eventually became BEAR Facts of Engineering had been developing quietly alongside all of this.

Jimmy had created an earlier educational framework called TEDDIES and spent years thinking about better ways of introducing young people to engineering. Gradually another idea emerged.

What if engineering could be discovered through stories?

What if the engineers were characters children cared about?

And what if those characters formed a team in which different minds, personalities, abilities and engineering disciplines mattered because no single character could solve every problem?

Jimmy coined the name BEAR Facts of Engineering, and the first pieces of a new world began to appear.

For years it remained a dream shared in conversations with his close friend Martin Sansone. Jimmy had the educational philosophy, the characters beginning to form in his imagination and the ambition to turn them into illustrated stories and animation. What he did not have was an affordable way for two people to build something on that scale.

Eventually the technology changed.

Martin and Jimmy began experimenting with a small animated series. Then Jimmy, impatient to see the idea become something tangible, began writing a book based on their early stories.

That manuscript changed everything.

Martin recognised that the idea deserved the time, structure and production system needed to give it a real chance. Together they began building BFOE seriously, with Jimmy as co-author and creative originator and Martin as co-creator and producer.

Today the BFOE team contains engineers with very different personalities, backgrounds, strengths and ways of seeing a problem. That is deliberate.

Jimmy spent a lifetime watching young people flourish when someone trusted them with responsibility, surrounded them with the right team and gave them a genuine problem worth solving. The bears carry that philosophy into every adventure.

He does not believe engineering begins with remembering formulas.

It begins with curiosity.

It grows through making mistakes, asking better questions and learning to work with people who can do things you cannot.

And sometimes the most important lesson a young person can learn is simply this:

I can help solve this.

For Jimmy, that is what the BFOE team has always been about.