Budding engineers from primary schools around Yorkshire are taking part in a nation-wide project to design and build extendable mechanical fingers and help set a new world record for the number of people playing the same piano.

The schools are working with engineers from the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) (www.amrc.co.uk) to build their designs and participate in the event — due to take place in Birmingham on 19 August.

The ‘Eighty Eight Pianists’ project is the brainchild of University of Cambridge professor Julian Allwood, who wanted to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death — and answer a simple question: has the smartphone killed invention?

Engineering researchers at the AMRC and seven other universities are helping Key Stage 2 children around the country to ‘fuse science and art’ and try to beat the world record, which currently stands at 21 people playing the same piano.

Professor Allwood said: “By inventing mechanical finger-extenders, we can have one person play each note, giving us ‘Eighty Eight Pianists’.

“Hearing about da Vinci’s inventions and learning how a piano works, the children have been working with the engineering teams to create the designs for the fingers.

“We’ve had nearly 2,100 pupils invent ideas for how we could play a piano from nearly 5m away, and we’ve had a fantastic time looking through these incredible inventions.

“Our aim now is to harness that creativity and for the engineering teams to work with the children to turn those seemingly impossible ideas into real life inventions that will be used to smash the world record later this year.”

The finger extenders will be taken to Birmingham, where 88 young piano students will be taught how to use them to play a new work composed by Martin Riley and conducted by Julian Lloyd Webber.

Erdem Ozturk, who is overseeing the AMRC’s contribution to the project, said: “There is potential in every child to be an inventor.

"Our role is to unlock that inventive problem-solving impulse and to challenge perceptions about engineering in the classroom — and what better way to do that than by combining science, technology, engineering and mathematics with art and music.”