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Centre for Engineering Education

Learn by doing. A blog dedicated to practical Engineering Education and related topics. Published by a team at Engineering at Sheffield with a spiritual home in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education, based in the Diamond at the University of Sheffield, UK. In the Faculty of Engineering we teach engineering and host the Centre for Engineering Education.

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Showing posts from April, 2026

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Everyone’s talking about AI: The breadth of AI in Engineering Education

on April 16, 2026

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Simulated practicals: not as hard as you may think - unless you get carried away.

When people talk about simulations of labs, they are, these days, often referring to computationally expensive, 3D virtual or augmented reality, graphically rich software. As an engineer of a certain age who started their career in simulating physical systems, for me, simulations can be significantly more numerical than graphical and this has led me to consider if simulated practicals could be altogether more straightforward. Engineering simulations are nothing more than theoretical descriptions of how the world behaves. If you are asking a student to determine the force required to accelerate a 1,500 kg car at 3.5 m/s2, the solution to the problem is essentially a simulation of the real world. While simulations are generally more complex, they are, in essence, just crunching numbers. My interest in simulated teaching practicals started at the beginning of the coronavirus lock-down. One of the easiest methods to translate an existing activity from an in-lab to a remot...

Becoming Comfortable with Black Box Engineering

In this article, Professor Andrew Garrard from the University of Sheffield and Dr Parakram Pyakurel from New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering discuss whether engineering education's traditional resistance to "black box" thinking remains fit for purpose. As simulation software, Industry 4.0 methods, and generative AI make it harder for engineers to understand the tools they use, is it time to take a pragmatic approach in education and consider black box engineering not as a threat to be resisted, but as an inevitability to be acknowledged? Cartoon images generated by AI using the prompt “Please can you read this article and come up with a simple pencil drawing cartoon that makes light of the general themes of the piece?”. This image was created using Open AI’s ChatGPT 5.4. There is a widely held belief amongst engineering educators that students should be discouraged from relying on a “black box” approach to engineering; that is, producing results...

Ten Years of The Diamond - Twelve Architects

The conception of Diamond Building was a huge project here at Sheffield Engineering that aimed to make a world leading space for Engineering teaching. It is the home of high quality teaching labs for all the engineering disciplines, as well as innovative teaching and study space. It is a wonderful space to be in and remains as popular as ever with students. The building led to the creation of a specialist multidisciplinary team to deliver and coordinate the teaching that takes place in it, and they continue to lead innovation in teaching and learning and are core contributors to the Centre for Engineering Education . This wouldn’t have been possible without the team who built the Diamond, Twelve Architects . They made the space both iconic and great for teaching, something that is often overlooked, but that has a huge impact on learning and learners. In this post Twelve Architects share their perspective of the project. This is part of our 10 years of the Diamond s...

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