Kids in business

Budding inventor Scott Crawley, nine, and his five-year-old sister Alice, talk business ideas Discuss this article

© ITP Images

Where are you from?
Scott & Alice: (Shouted in unison) England!

So what do you like best about Dubai?
Alice: Swimming! And the beaches. I like making sand castles. They usually fall apart before I can finish them!

Scott: I usually make sand bombs. Take some wet sand and some dry sand and you make a ball to make a sand bomb.

What else do you like to make?
Scott: I have an inventions book that I draw my inventions in. I want to be a scientist when I grow up.

What are you working on at the moment?
Scott: (Nods and flips to a page with fancy drawings.) A hover board. There’s a hover pad and the sensors and it floats above the ground… (goes on to explain, in great technical detail, how it will work).

Ooohh what is this?
Scott: Oh, that’s a vibrating towel. When you wrap it around you, it starts vibrating.

Alice: You don’t have to dry. It dries you for you!

What do you make, Alice?
Alice: I like to paint and draw pictures. (She fetches a tall rectangular box, covered in paintings.)

Scott: Alice! Not the building! (Mum asks, ‘What are you doing, Alice?’)

Alice: (giggles) This is a box. This is its mouth and this is hair and this is... it kinda looks like me (points to a yellow blotch of a smiley face before running out again, returning with a rather sorry-looking polar bear).

What’s your bear’s name?
Alice: (Is silent for a while trying to remember) Shiver!

Scott: About a month ago his name was Teddy.

Alice: He’s so... he’s so... he’s so loved he doesn’t have any hair on him!

So how did Alice lose her front tooth?
(Mum mouths, ‘Scott did it, but it was an accident’.)

Scott: Well, she was trying to draw on my foot, she got hold of my toes and I meant to go that way (he demonstrates his leg movements) but I went a little like this first to get a bit of a drawback before I moved it, but her face was there.

Did it hurt?
Alice: Yup. I cried.