UK & Ireland Engineering Education Network

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The recent 2025 UK and Ireland Engineering Education Network conference at the University of Manchester was a brilliant opportunity to meet engineering educators, to hear about work that is taking place across HE, and to play with Lego in the name of education and outreach. Here, Michael Trikic shares his take aways.

A big idea from the conference was that the HE sector is facing systemic challenges and change, think reduced budgets, increased competition, generative AI, but that there are opportunities too. The recently published Industrial Strategy 2025 has engineering at its core, and will require a pipeline of engineers to fulfil it. What this means for HE isn't clear, and perhaps this kind of announcement isn't anything new (see keynote, below), but more on that later. All the papers discussed in this post and more, can be found in the conference proceedings.

Lego, ducks, hoppers and positive memories  

The theme of the meeting was The Authenticity of Engineering Education: Learning, Teaching and Assessment in Developing Engineers for Industry Today and a Global Tomorrow. Personal highlights were two workshops, the first being 50% for the Future – Designing Effective Outreach for recruitment of underrepresented groups into Engineering: “Lego Ducks and Hoppers!”, about an outreach programme that aims to secure a more diverse intake into Mechanical engineering. It's an essential goal to secure a pipeline of quality of engineers, and the project seeks to do something different by operating strategically and at scale across the UK. A wealth of outreach takes place in universities, but it is often ad hoc, the approach could help change this and amplify the impact of outreach. During the workshop we heard about the work Jennifer Thompson and her team have been doing, but also got hands on with a Lego Education taster activity that included engineering learning in the form of problem solving and team work. I had the pleasure of working with Estabaliz Fraca and Xzara Foster to 'improve' code controlled Lego hopper, guess which one was ours...


The second workshop was Empowering Engineers to Support their Wellbeing, run by Jo-Anne Tait and Jan Peters, and it concisely set out ideas about identity and well being, and how engineers can benefit by better understanding how these relate to them. During the workshop we were introduced to techniques that are proven to be effective in increasing awareness of both, and the quality of the latter. We tried out some of them, and applied a technique that improves awareness of listening skills by focussing on positive memories, and that can be used as a tool to enhance positive feelings and wellbeing. It was a great way to start a Friday.   

Workshops at conferences are good for trying out teaching, incidental networking and feeding into projects, but talks are usually the way to find out about a diverse range of projects and to hear from people. The keynote John Heywood reminded us that many things in engineering education do not change, for example the tension between abstract and practice based learning, questions about the value of exams as a dominant form of assessment, and the difficulty of translating research into practice, but also that some things do, albeit slowly. For example, the perception of who can become an engineer, and how policy changes can lead to long term and profound changes, sometime unintended. Food for thought in the HE landscape, especially with regards to how Industrial Policies of the past have called for more engineers. A more fundamental point was that the theory of learning and knowledge is critical to make genuine

pedagogical and epistemic breakthroughs. These are rare and difficult. Maria Valera Espina dug into this vein by presenting work that explored theories of learning. An idea that stood out was that some people are inclined to be Incremental Theorists, who by nature see difficult tasks as a challenge and opportunity for learning, and who view failure as a chance to review and learn. Perhaps the model student, but we can't all be that person. However, the work sought to understand the implications of how understanding this might help engineering educators to develop better practice and consider the nature of learners in assessment, perhaps by developing safe learning environments that allow students to fail and not to be fearful of doing so. 

Centre for Engineering Education on Tour 

As ever, there was a strong contingent from Sheffield who were presenting work on a wide range of topics:

  • Transferable and Employability Skills in Postgraduate Project Supervision: A Project- Based Learning Framework for Chinese EEE Postgraduates in UK Higher Education (Rola Saad and Ya He), 
  • The control101 toolbox and a modern delivery of an introductory control course (Anthony Rossiter) 
  • Evidence-based multidisciplinary Design- Project Implementation for training industry ready engineering graduates (Payam Soulatiantork and Mo Zandi) 
  • Enhancing student employability with reflection and employer collaboration (Eleni Routoula, Claire Brooke, James Zeller)
  •  Implementing Sustainable, Ethical and Inclusive Teaching into Undergraduate Engineering courses (Harry Spears and Andy Nichols)

My own paper was about the work Tara Baldachinno and I have been doing to teach inclusive engineering in a way that is meaningful and engaging for engineering students, something I have been working on for a while. Principles of inclusive engineering in the work are aligned with The British Standards Institute definition that “the design of mainstream products and/or services that are accessible to, and usable by, people with the widest range of abilities within the widest range of situations without the need for special adaptation or design” (British Standards Institute, 2005). Graduate engineers who are able to understand and work following these principles will be better engineers whose technical work will be more effective and impactful. With the help of Fudial Ajaz, we developed a workshop following principles of inquiry based learning (Spronken-Smith, 2012; Aditomo et al., 2013) in which students study and discuss case studies in groups. Case studies of engineering failure are commonly used to teach about engineering, relevant example to this work are the repurposing of hernia repair materials for pelvic floor repair (Farr et al., 2024) or discriminatory automotive safety testing protocols (Linder and Svedberg, 2019). After testing the workshop with over 150 students we can show that it is effective in improving student's understanding, knowledge and confidence in the topic, as well as self reported engineering skills, but we also have a huge number of text comments that support our future plans and aim to better integrate inclusive engineering into the curriculum.  

As a end note, the venue was Manchester's 'Diamond', the Nancy Rothwell Building, and an example of a modern space for students to study, with labs, lecture theatres, workrooms, cafes, and space. It's an impressive space to be in, albeit not as light and pleasant as Sheffield's Diamond, but I would say that wouldn't I? 

Thank you James Brooks for organising the event, I look forward to the next iteration.

References

Aditomo, A. et al. (2013) ‘Inquiry-based learning in higher education: principal forms, educational objectives, and disciplinary variations’, Studies in Higher Education, 38(9), pp. 1239–1258. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.616584.

British Standards Institute (2005) BS 7000-6:2005, BSI Knowledge. Available at: https://knowledge.bsigroup.com/products/design-management-systems-managing-inclusive-design-guide?version=standard&tab=overview (Accessed: 1 April 2024).

Linder, A et al. (2019) 'Review of average sized male and female occupant models in European regulatory safety assessment tests and European laws: Gaps and bridging suggestions',

Accident Analysis & Prevention, Volume 127, Pages 156-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2019.02.030.

Farr, N.T.H. et al. (2024) ‘Uncovering the relationship between macrophages and polypropylene surgical mesh’, Biomaterials Advances, 159, p. 213800. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bioadv.2024.213800.

Spronken-Smith, R. (2012) ‘Experiencing the process of knowledge creation: The nature and use of inquiry-based learning in higher education’, in International Colloquium on Practices for Academic Inquiry. University of Otago, pp. 1–17.