On Tuesday, the students were given the design brief, which as setting out the operational requirements of the research station, also described the extreme Antarctic environment that the laboratory will need to withstand. On Thursday, the student's initial concepts will be critiqued by video conference call with Chris Wise and Ed McCann down in London. On Friday, Chris and Ed will travel up to Cambridge to run a three hour intensive design and review session to round the activity up, at which the best design will be chosen.

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The move to London will enable Ed to more closely tie together his teaching work and his work in practice, and will allow him to more effectively draw upon the resources of Expedition Engineering and the rest of the Useful Simple Trust in his teaching.

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Expedition Workshed

Three basic requirements emerged as necessary for teaching sustainability: motivation; knowledge; and confidence. The working groups discussed broad-ranging solutions for meeting these requirements, with a number of key themes emerging including: the challenge, or even the irrelevance of testing sustainability; the need to create a multidisciplinary discussions to help engineers take a holistic view to sustainability in construction projects; and how to develop an ethical understanding of sustainability, as profound as the Hippocratic oath. We will shortly be publishing the findings of the workshop.

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We produced this set of videos with funding from CONSTRUCT and in collaboration with Imperial College Civil and Environmental Engineering Department’s Materials Testing Laboratory.
We designed these videos to give students the opportunity to see material tests that they would rarely get the opportunity to see in the laboratory. A brief description of the test, contextual images and downloadable data sheets accompany each test.

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The event is co-sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Joint Board of Moderators, the organisation responsible for accrediting university civil engineering courses in the UK. Go to the project page to read more.

The Constructionarium is a week-long hands-on learning event in which 100 undergraduate civil engineers get to build big: scale versions of structures such as the Gherkin, the Millau Viaduct and hydroelectric dam, to name a few of the typical projects.

Think Up founders Ed McCann and Chris Wise designed the original Constructionarium over ten years ago in response to a common industry complaint: that even the best engineering graduates have never built anything – so how can they be expected to design anything that can be built?

This time, as well as teaching students how to build, we are adding a series of complementary activities which explore why these civil engineering projects are necessary. By adding a pub quiz, mock public consultation and film night, we are challenging engineering students to think for themselves about the role they have to play in building society's infrastructure.

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Read more about Constructionarium here.

A dozen children at a time were to be found building towers, bridges and sculptures from the 1,500 cardboard octagons provided. One boy even managed to construct a stegosaurus. In stark contrast to our corporate neighbours around us, the Think Make Test Play stand oozed creativity, activity and fun.

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Our brief is to design a high-impact stand that will excite young people about structural engineering. We’re not giving much away at this stage, but working with our sister company thomas.matthews we think we have a concept for something creative, daring and unusual – which is what you would expect when Think Up and thomas.matthews get together. Watch this space.

The Skills Academy will consist of an initial 14 leading ‘hub’ colleges across England working in partnership with other training providers. Think Up is part of the consortium led by the College of North West London, which was the only successful consortium to bid in the whole of London and the South East of England. Our other partners in this hub include Lambeth College, Skills2Learn, Able Skills, London South Bank University, Logic4Training, Apprenticeship Training Ltd and Daikin UK Ltd”
We aim to work with our hub partners to blaze a trail in developing high impact awareness-raising training events for low-carbon skills.
As a showcase for working with our hub partners we will be running a week of events on the Big Rig as part of the College of North West London’s Industry Day. More details to follow.