I’ve been helping out in DIT’s engineering design projects module again this year, which Micheál O’Flaherty, Fionnuala Farrell, and John Nolan have transformed from the ‘Energy Cube’ project we led last year to a project that involves the design of a model spaceship. Photos from yesterday’s performance testing class are included in the gallery directly below. I’m happy to report that all the egg-stronauts survived the crash test fully intact!

This past summer, Micheál and I presented a paper about the Energy Cube project in San Sebastian, Spain. (O’Flaherty M.P., Chance, S., Farrell, C.F. and Montague, C. Introducing New Engineering Students to Mechanical Concepts through an “Energy Cube” Project, International Joint Conference on the Learner in Engineering Education (IJCLEE 2015), San Sebastian, Spain, July 6-9, 2015.)

Fionnuala and I travelled to the UK to present a paper on a different aspect of the project at a conference in Loughborough. (Farrell, C.F., Chance, S., O’Flaherty M.P., An energy cube project for teaching engineering design process, International conference on engineering and product design education, Loughborough University, England, September 3-4, 2015.)

Earlier in the summer, I presented yet another aspect of our work in Orleans, France. (Beagon, U. et al. (2015) Using Theory to Improve Design Instruction in a New Common First-Year Programme For Engineers. Paper presented at 43rd. annual SEFI Conference June 29th.-July 2nd. 2015, Orléans, France.)

The Loughborough conference included a dinner at the UK National Space Centre, where I got to see historic satellites, space ships and rockets (see photo gallery) alongside engineers who had actually worked on their designs.