I flew down to the South of France to spend the bank holiday weekend with my former students and colleagues from Hampton University’s Department of Architecture, part of the School of Engineering and Technology. After a morning of sketching in Montpellier’s main plaza, we took trams out to the suburbs to see buildings designed by Jean Nouvelle, Rob Krier, and Zaha Hadid.
The trip was organized by HU professors Mason Andrews and Ray Gindroz.
Me and WUT’s PW-5.
I just spent a most unexpectedly sublime week in Warsaw. What a beautiful, walkable, and livable city! Just the right density — useful public transport, affordable bike rentals, green space at regular intervals, and architectural monuments galore.
My primary task was to conduct interviews with budding engineers. Over the course of the week, eleven Polish women (who are studying various sorts of physics and engineering) each volunteered an hour and a half to share their experiences with me. It was amazingly insightful to discover similarities and difference with the experiences of the 10 Irish and 11 foreign-born women I’ve interviewed at Dublin Institute of Technology. (I also have 11 interviews recorded with Portuguese women, but these must still be translated.)
Fortunately for me, the students in Poland can opt to take their classes in Polish, or English, or a mixture of both. These Polish women spoke English very well and were bold enough to grant me interviews in my own native tongue.
In the evening hours I had time to explore some sites, depicted in the photos below.
The big project we had on last week….
Forty-two secondary students–half girls and half boys–from the Dublin area built RoboSlam robots as part of the “Engineer Your Future” program provided by DIT. These ‘Transition Year’ students were eager to learn about electrical, electronic, and product design engineering and to explore engineering careers.
The RoboSlam volunteer team was on-site four days to help the “Engineer Your Future” students and organizers and to lead robotics and electronics portions of the week-long project. The students also participated in tours and smaller projects–writing essays, building spaghetti towers, and touring a power plant, for instance.
The week culminated with a RoboSumo championship, a rumble among all robots built during the week, and an awards ceremony.
The engineering lecturers were highly impressed with the talent and enthusiasm of this group. We’re hoping to see these budding engineers at DIT or another of Ireland’s fabulous engineering programmes in a couple of years!
A glimpse of what our RoboSlam crew has been upto lately….
RoboSlam participants with Ireland’s Junior Minister for Social Protection, Kevin Humphreys.
Dr Ted Burke and a team of staff and students composed of Frank Duignan, Shannon Chance, Shane Ormonde and Damon Berry, delivered a RoboSlam workshop for primary school kids at the two day Tech Week event in Dublin Castle on Thursday 30th of April. In all, 24 children from a primary school in Foxrock were given an opportunity to build Sumo Robots as part of the Tech Week activities. There was lots of interest from other visitors to the event.
The two day Dublin Castle event, which is organised by the Irish Computer Society, also included a competition for junior social entrepreneurs, the Irish finals of the Formula Schools Challenge and the finals of inter school Scratch competition.
RoboSlam participants with the RoboSlam volunteer team.
During the course of the day the RoboSlam workshop was also visited by Junior…
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