Handbook

In this course, students will experience first-hand one of the major things that engineers do: designing and building creative solutions to problems. They will learn to think the way that engineers think, coming up with good solutions to problems despite being limited by budget, time and resources, the requirement to also meet environmental and social objectives and of course the limitations of the laws of physics. This will help them to appreciate the central ideas of engineering design as an on-time, on-budget and fit for purpose solution to a poorly specified, open-ended problem. They will be assigned to a team to work over a ten week period to solve a practical problem. The project on offer will change from year to year. In doing all this they will start to build key skills for engineers that will be called upon repeatedly in their academic and professional lives, including concept development, critical thinking and evaluation skills, clear communication, research and information literacy skills and the skills involved in successfully functioning within a team environment to complete a given task.