Programme - Day 1

Arrive at the Foyer, grab a cup of coffee and register for the conference. This is an opportunity for you to meet other delegates before the first events starts.

This will be held in the lecture theatre. After a short introduction from Claire Ketnor, the chair of the first day of the conference, and the obligatory housekeeping information, the opening plenary will be delivered by our keynote presenter, Dr. Keerthi Devendra (Director, KD Engineering Consultancy and Former Chief of Sub-Systems at Rolls Royce plc). This will be followed by a question and answer session.

Practical Engineering Excellence - why and how?

Society has always depended on the ability of engineers to produce the most effective solutions to problems of the day. In solving ‘problems’, engineers must understand how to apply scientific principles to create useful practical products and processes that help human activities. As such, within the curriculum, engineering students need to develop practical skills in parallel with analytical skills that would give them the confidence to approach a problem rationally and deliver innovative solutions once they step into the world of work.

Most young engineers acquire valuable hands-on practical experience during a period of internship, whilst being employed in a specific industry sector. Within the programme of academic study, some students have the opportunity to gain invaluable work experience during a sandwich placement. However, the challenges faced by the industry in the modern world mean that, although these methods are useful, there is an ever-increasing demand for versatile, ‘industry-ready graduates’. The engineering curriculum delivery methods need to meet this challenge.

Universities have well-developed, time-tested approaches that provide scientific and practical engineering education to students to enable them to solve problems in their respective fields of study. To close the gap between skills acquired within the academic environment and the competence needed to work successfully in a wide range of industries, the students need to develop a range of transferable skills that will apply in any engineering context. However, to achieve the broader objectives of this conference, the speaker believes that it is equally important to focus on approaches to develop subject-specific practical skills. This can only be done by specialists in a subject area at the module team level with innovative thinking and perhaps radical changes in approach. For example, in a student population of diverse knowledge, skill, and ability levels, modelling and simulation may fascinate many IT-savvy students, while some others may be more interested in a direct hands-on approach to learning imparted through industry standard machinery and equipment in a well-designed laboratory set-up.

In an increasingly global scenario, practical engineering education is about developing high calibre, industry-ready engineers the world needs. This keynote speech is intended to generate some ideas about what we need to think about and how we need to approach the challenge within a highly time-constrained academic environment. The speaker will use his extensive experience in the aerospace industry to promote some ideas and facilitate further discussion.

A curated icebreaker activity to allowed delegates to get to know one another. This activity can be opted out of if you don't feel comfortable to take part.

Following the networking session, coffee a coffee break will be available at 11:15

In this session we will hear from three presenters, details of which can be found below. During the presentations, there will be no time for Q&A. If you have questions for the presenters, we would encourage you to open a discussion with them over lunch.

1. "Scaling Up Practical Teaching: The 1000 Student Week".

Matteo Di Benedetti, Harry Day & Sarah Archibald, University of Sheffield.

MEE is a specialist in practical lab teaching, but due to increasing student numbers we must get creative about optimising the use of equipment and lab space. This presentation will use a case study to illustrate how we have improved delivery of one lab-activity from catering to <200 students over 2 weeks, to around 1000 students in just 1 week. We will discuss the key strategies adopted to make lab delivery more efficient for staff and the department, whilst also improving the teaching quality for students. The material here can be useful for other institutions facing similar challenges regarding lab teaching.

2. "UK Race To Space - a national student propulsion competition to boost the UK space sector".

Alistair John, University of Sheffield.

UK Race To Space - a national student propulsion competition to boost the UK space sector This presentation will introduce the UK Race To Space initiative. This is a new initiative aiming to boost the UK space sector by developing a space training infrastructure and ‘pipeline of talent’ to provide the highly-skilled graduates the UK space industry desperately need in order to continue to grow and compete on the world stage.

Currently where university courses cover space exploration, they tend to be heavily theoretical with limited opportunity to connect lecture content to real world applications. This results in a lack of students with a deep passion for the sector and few graduates with the practical skills desperately sought after by industry. Additionally, the space sector (and STEM careers in general) suffer from a skills gap and a lack of diversity. Our proposed competition aims to solve this.

The initiative proposes a new liquid/hybrid rocket engine design, build and test competition for teams of UK undergraduate students. The purpose of the competition is twofold; firstly to provide students with hands-on engineering experience designing, manufacturing and testing rocket engines. This will provide the students with a fantastic practical educational experience in solving real-world, complex, open-ended engineering problems but will also provide the UK space sector with the better trained, better prepared graduates it needs to continue its ambitious growth.

Secondly, the competition will be used to encourage students from school age upwards to choose STEM subjects, degrees and aim for space careers. The final year undergraduate level competition will act as a capstone project bridging the large gap in the currently available UK extra-curricular rocket activities between school level and industry. The project will see passionate, top graduates interested in rocket science sharing their enthusiasm and acting as mentors to school children to take part in space related activities such as UKROC. By targeting under-represented students through mentoring at those schools, the project will lead to an increase in diversity and improvements in EDI. A requirement of the student teams will be to design and implement an EDI strategy to encourage representation by more deprived schools, as well as ensuring the student teams adopt a diversity focussed recruitment program. Through an activity such as this, we will see huge benefits for UK students and universities, growth of the UK space sector’s ability to compete on the world stage through better trained and more diverse graduates and a more diverse range of engineering talent in the UK. Please see the white paper for more detail and background on this subject.

3. "Electrical and Electronic Engineering: Integrating practical skill development into the course structure".

Daniel Fallows, Steve Greedy and Steve Bull, University of Nottingham.

Practical engineering skills encompassing design, build, and debugging, are attributes desired by the employers of graduate engineers. They can therefore be considered as one of the most important skillsets acquired by students studying engineering. Yet, many degree courses isolate practical activities to short time-limited and tightly constrained pieces of work, intended to supplement taught material. This carries the real risk that a graduate student may only experience a significant element of practical design-based project work through their capstone project in the final year of their degree. The lack of skills essential to the development of the capstone project may also hamper its progress, by the need for students to acquire pre-requisite skills “on the fly”, diverting attention from the core project.

This work presents an approach to course structure that is centred on the development of a core, practical engineering skillset from entry at year one through to final year. The Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Nottingham have applied this since a course review in 2015. Through this, structured practical project work, both individual and group, are significant elements of each year of the course. This paper details the course structure, providing learning aims for each year group and showing how practical work is aligned with taught material both within and across year groups. Finally, the work presents suggestions of best practice for educators wanting to bring a greater practical focus to their teaching.

Eat some food

A presentation by one of our sponsors: TecQuipment. TecQuipment is the leading provider of high-quality practical teaching equipment for a range of engineering disciplines. Since 1958, the company prides itself on providing high-quality engineering equipment that is used by over 1,500 customers worldwide. The products allow students and educators to perform practical experiments to illustrate engineering principles and prepare students with highly sought-after skills required for the engineering labour market. A technology partnership was formed with Learning Sci to develop digital learning tool to offer students using a select range of Engineering Science kits with new, complementary and unique learning experiences LearnSci is an innovative learning technology provider that creates transformative digital learning experiences. For the last 15 years, LearnSci’s team of scientists, education specialists and web developers have been developing accessible digital tools that engage students, build scientific skills and transform lab teaching.

In this session, a choice of two facilitated workshops will be taken place. Each workshop will last 45. Choose which of the of the following you are interested in and head to the correct workroom.

1. "Theory and Practice in Lectures: The use of practical remote laboratories to link theory and practical engineering."

John Turner, University of Nottingham.

Workroom 1

A challenge associated with the delivery of engineering related materials is conveying the theoretical knowledge students require in a practical and corroborative context. Various methods have been applied to help students link the theory to the practice; case studies, contextual industrial examples, and problem-based learning. However, these generally operate within isolation in the lecture theatre setting, and do not involve a practical based comparison.

The aim of this research is to directly link theoretical lectures with practical laboratories using remote access software, such as MS Teams. The objectives are to create comparable representations of theory applied in lectures with directly measurable remote practicals, to generate a series of examples of ‘good’ practice to act as both guide and foundation for further activity, and to qualitatively measure the impact of such activities from the students perspective.

The workshop will be an interactive demonstration of an example planned to be applied in the coming academic year, with supporting justifications from an educational standpoint on the practicality of the activity and the methodology of data collection.

2. "Electronic Worksheets for Developing Student Focus on Error Sources in Practicals".

Bernard Treves Brown, University of Manchester.

Workroom 2

For several years we have been concerned that second-year chemical engineering students’ treatment of error sources is weak. Many are happy to list error sources in reports, but on paper and in end-of-experiment interviews, are reluctant to estimate their magnitude. With the move to online teaching in September 2020 we worked with LearningScience Ltd to develop electronic worksheets to improve this. The first, free-standing, sheet takes students through choosing and calculating the error for a range of temperature measurement chains. Subsequent sheets are tied to experiments. To reduce guessing and encourage deeper consideration, for each measurand students consider error magnitude by matching a range of possible error magnitudes with possible feedback; they then perform the calculations for their experiments on the worksheets. Each sheet has calculations using traditional error propagation, and others using a numerical method to estimate the error which the sheet then compares with the analytical solution.

Student comments on the sheets have been positive and very high engagement is observed despite a relatively low weighting (10%).

There is as lab tour in this slot for those interested to see the facilities, details of the tour can be found here.

Interactive demonstration will be on show in the Foyer. These will be run on a drop in basis, so wander over to the demonstration areas to see what is going on.

1. "Virtual Computing as a tool to enhance the authenticity of teaching and assessment" .

Luis Canhoto Neves, Becca Ferrari, Chris Parry, Steve Greedy, Simon Swinburne, Simon Harrison, James Bonnyman, Mark McCorquodale, University of Nottingham.

The lack of access to computer labs was a major challenge in Engineering teaching during lockdown. Computations tools are an integral part of all engineering courses and the conditions available in computer rooms can’t be reproduced in personal devices. This paper describes how virtual desktops were used to enhance the learning experience far beyond what was possible in person.

We focus on advanced use of computational resources, including advanced programming and complex 3D modelling. Cloud computing, in particular, the Azure Labs, provided us the ability of deploying custom specialized computers to students for specific tasks, far better than any computer they could buy. This resulted in work environments much closer to industry standards, increasing authenticity but reducing inequality.

Case study A describes how an advanced computing module used individual virtual Linux servers and GPU enhanced desktops to faithfully reproduce the experience in industry. By providing individual servers to students we give them far more power and freedom, allowing them to explore new solutions without risking impacting on other students.

Case study B describes how virtual desktops were used in rendering of 3D objects using state of the art virtual workstations. These reduced the computation time of a model from 5 hours to 10 minutes, improving the quality of the designs, reducing the frustration of hours of wait but, above all, significantly reduced inequality in access to resources, providing all students with the same computational resources.

2. "Smart Worksheets: digitally transforming the delivery of practical teaching while enhancing engineering students’ active learning experience".

Amirah Way (Learning Sci) and Anders Hill (TecQuipment)

Educators are under pressure to reduce their burden of spending hundreds of hours of repetitive marking and providing individual feedback on assignments and assessments. They want a solution that can help them easily monitor how engaged students are with their course as well as gain detailed insights into progress of individual learning so that contact time can be better spent with meaningful conversations and experiments. Smart Worksheets are a collection of ready-made interactive online assessments that complement in-class theory and practical lab teaching. They are designed to give students the confidence to practice performing calculations associated with an experiment. As these worksheets are auto-graded, students are given instant feedback. Educators can see where the students struggle, where they succeed, and identify areas for tailored follow-up sessions for support. Students gain because they get to practice anywhere, anytime, and learn from any mistakes with real-time and personalised feedback, enabling them to master their understanding of key theory and application at their own pace. These digital Smart Worksheets, already successfully deployed across science labs, bring mutual benefits to both educators and students by positively transforming the teaching and learning experience3

3. "Lab in a box - Remote electrical and electronics laboratories using low-cost development tools and platforms"

Alan F. Holloway, Sheffield Hallam University

The COVID pandemic has highlighted the need for flexible and accessible laboratory teaching environments and how with appropriate technology and hardware/software tools remote learning can be utilized to deliver a genuine hands on practical lab experience.

This paper discusses how remote laboratories “lab in a box setup” have been developed and deployed for teaching a range of topics within the electrical & electronic engineering curriculum. The lab in a box setup typically comprises of software, hardware platform, associated electrical/electronic/mechanical components/connectors and the associated online learning materials such as screencasts, datasheets, lecture notes. The lab in a box kits were shipped to students home or work addresses (national and international) before the start of academic delivery and students directed how to install the associated software and setup the hardware tools.

Crucial to the successful delivery is the live online academic led laboratory session. Students effectively attend a lab session in their own home/study space with the academic leading the session online instructing students through worksheets, actively engaging with students in real time through shared screens and associated audio/video. The setup has enabled interactive hands-on practical lab sessions with academics being able to, view/analyse data, solve issues, providing feedback and assess performance both formative and summative where required. Additionally, and of significant impact to the student experience, is the open access always available lab resource; giving students an opportunity to work flexibly to suit their own learning styles and time commitments.

Following the Demonstrations, a coffee break will be provided at 15:15 in the Foyer.

A presentation by one of our sponsors: Matrix TSL. Matrix TSL is a one stop shop for industrial standard training equipment, satisfying education needs across the globe, by providing only the most rugged and curriculum driven equipment. With students and learning at the heart of every decision made, Matrix creates solutions in Science, Engineering and Technology by developing, manufacturing and writing curriculum, all here in the UK.

Using the most advanced equipment on the market, Matrix have developed a vast catalogue of products from robotics and microcontrollers, to electrical installation, automotive, fundamental mechanics and structures.

This house believes

An engineering lab is different to a science lab

The University of Nottingham will take on the University of Liverpool to compete to sway your opinions.

• Proposing team (in favour of the proposition): John Turner and Luis Neves, Nottingham University.

• Opposing team (against the proposition): Helen Vaughan and Cate Cropper, Liverpool University

• Chairman (Referee): Stephen Beck, and someone to keep time!

We will follow a standard debate format:

Start with a vote.

• 1st Proposition (5 mins). This will set out the basic arguments in favour.

• 1st Opposition (5 mins). This will set out the basic arguments against.

• 2nd Proposition (3 mins). This will address the arguments against.

• 2nd Opposition (3 mins). This will address the arguments in favour.

• Questions and points from the floor (15 mins, maximum of one min per speaker)

• Concluding remarks (4 mins from one member of the proposing team)

• Concluding remarks (4 mins from one member of the opposing team)

• End with a vote.

And what of the audience?

They will be expected to provide a series of short speeches (1 min max), bringing up points for and against the motion. The concluding remarks from the teams are expected to deal with these.

From the floor, we always like "Points of order" and "Points of information" which take precedence over other points.

A presentation by one of our sponsors: Quanser. Quanser is the world leader in innovative technology for engineering education and research. With a heritage in creating leading-edge platforms for controls, mechatronics, and robotics, Quanser has built a legacy over the past 30 years of transformational solutions that bring emerging technologies including autonomous robotics, IoT, self-driving, and virtual reality to students worldwide. Quanser is unique as the only commercial organization that offers a comprehensive, academically sound platform for delivering programs that push the boundaries of traditional engineering education and research. Though a wide network of academic partners and faculty equivalent researchers and course designers, Quanser works with institutions to solve the challenges of modern engineering as true colleagues as opposed to conventional vendors.

Following the presentation from Quanser, at 17:15 Day 1 will be wrapped up with some closing remarks. During the closing remarks, delegates will be asked to consider if they have any ideas for the exchange the following day.

A drinks reception will be served in the Foyer.