Category: Engineering in the Community

348 of our first year student engineers have completed Project Week with great success!

Project Week plays a central role in UWE Bristol’s Engineering Practise module, part of our Integrated Learning Framework, which nurtures creativity, innovation and collaboration through training on ‘live’ projects and problems.

Motivated by UWE’s 2020 strategy to educate for sustainable development, for the past three years the Engineering, Design and Mathematics Department has partnered with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) to deliver project based learning activities that develop a sense of global responsibility in students. This year the week-long challenge was to find engineering solutions to issues identified by the local people of Lobitos and Piedritas, Peru.

To help guide our students through the challenges of Project Week, staff and students utilised the new Innovation and Design Thinking Toolkit designed by Bristol-based software company Newicon. The kit features a set of engaging workshops, exercises and tools designed to help our students explore and define real human-centred problems and move through the design cycle at pace.

I am delighted to hear that the UWE’s revolutionary redesigned curriculum that nurtures creativity, innovation and collaboration has successfully utilised Newicon’s Innovation Toolkit to promote and practise Design Thinking.

When we created the Kit it was aimed at tech startups and organisations creating innovative new digital products and services, so it is testament to the versatility of the methodologies that the kit has now been successfully adapted for the Engineering without Borders project.

To see some 348 students benefiting from our approach is fantastic and we look forward to working with UWE, as a partner, to further develop the innovation kit so more students can benefit over the coming years.

Mark Probert, Digital Strategy Director, Newicon

And here is what our student engineers had to say about using the Kit:

This was fantastic! well laid out and presented and easy to work through!

Useful, it gave us some good guidelines to follow

Had useful tips, especially for creating a design criteria

…the UWE design innovation kit was really easy to understand and work through

UWE 1st Year Student Engineers

The Innovation and Design Thinking Toolkit has been a huge success here at UWE, and we look forward to using it for future projects. We were also thrilled to hear that the team at Newicon were recently shortlisted for a community SPARKies Award for their work on the Kit!

For more information on the Newicon and the Kit visit https://newicon.net/

Here lies the results of the final student challenge set in the Engineering in the Community module.

Robert Fleming, Joseph Ford and Claudia Paduano on the Engineering Competence Postgraduate Diploma, sought to improve shop accessibility and therefore footfall in high streets. They partnered with Airbus, Babcock and Bedminster Business Improvement District, to provide a portable solution to the accessibility issues facing the Bubble Play Café in Bedminster. You can read more about how the team met this community need below:

Students taking the Engineering Competence Postgraduate Diploma have the option to take the community challenge module – Engineering in the Community. Five groups undertook varied projects, and this is the 4th in our blog series showcasing the results.

For this community challenge, William Holmes, Paul Trimble and Elisabeth Woeldgen, partnered with Incredible Edible Bristol, Airbus and the Science & Technology Facilities council, to create an insulated compost bin. The team delivered the prototype compost bin made of reusable materials to Speedwell Allotment, along with accompanying instructional material for Incredible Edible to use on their education sites. Read more about the project below:

In this blog series, we’re showcasing the Engineering Competence Postgraduate Diploma students’ community challenges, completed as part of the Engineering in the Community module.

For this project, Airbus‘ Ross Gardner & Ed Wheatcroft partnered with Residents Against Dirty Energy (RADE) to try and find ways to keep open workshop and garage spaces warm without producing pollutants that are detrimental to health. A number of potential solutions have been outlined in their poster below.

Students from our Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering competence have presented results from real-world community challenges set in the Engineering in the Community module. These group projects will be showcased in the next few blog posts, so stay tuned….

First up, are Airbus employees S. Cole,  D. Guerrero and  A. Hayes, who worked with Residents Against Dirty Energy (RADE) – a community group who aim to reduce emissions from static burning. The student project focussed on wood burning as a heat source for those who live in vans and found that improving efficiency was key for reducing emissions.

Read their poster to find out more about the project.