This week, I have invited Richard Blatcher, Autodesk’s head of manufacturing marketing for Northern Europe, to describe an excellent scheme, now being rolled out globally, to inspire youngsters to take up careers in engineering and engineering design.
If the current economic downturn has a silver lining, it could be that it teaches teenagers that careers in banking or the stock exchange do not necessarily represent a fast route to easy wealth, while encouraging hard-working, talented young people to re-evaluate the opportunities of vocational careers like engineering.
Recent changes within the processes, workflow and culture of engineering and manufacturing industries may act as a further spur. When these are translated and communicated to very young students – even those that have just begun secondary school - mindsets could be transformed.
Imagine you are sitting in a design and technology class now. It is nearing the end of the afternoon and you are bored, tired and listless. How would you respond to then having to create 2D plans for a new design? Suppose instead that the school had invested in the technology to allow you to create life-like 3D models of your ideas, especially if these can be spun, manipulated, tested and animated like a computer game? Which would you prefer?
In fact, in schools across Europe, children are being introduced to the ease and accuracy of 3D design, using industry-standard software. Yet, will this attract them into a career in engineering? Encouraging schoolchildren and university students to enjoy 3D design software is certainly a step in the right direction. However, there are several aspects to catching and nurturing potential engineers while they are young.
While it is important to get them designing like engineers, they also need to be guided to think for themselves and encouraged to work creatively. As is regularly demonstrated in the manufacturing industry, creativity is a key differentiator. However, this fact is rarely taught in CAD or engineering courses.
To redress this, Autodesk has developed the Creative Curriculum, a new initiative, which is being used in university engineering and product design departments. Indeed, it has already been ‘road-tested’ in a range of London schools where it is helping teachers prepare students for Key Stages 3 and 4, GCSE and ‘A’ Level and Engineering Diplomas.
Although the course focuses on what can be achieved through digital design, the use of software is only one part of the story. Rather, the emphasis is on innovation and creativity and inspiring students to think differently. Several teachers have confirmed that, since they started using 3D design software at schools, students are volunteering to spend their afternoons in the school laboratories. 3D is motivating and energising them and stimulating their creativity.
“Designing in 3D is a challenge for anyone,” says James Hannam at Thomas Cowley High School in Lincolnshire, where the technology department uses 3D digital design. “When Year Eleven pupils are first shown Autodesk Inventor, they all say, ‘this looks really difficult.’ But, as soon as they click, suddenly it’s: ‘this is fantastic’ and they want to sit and play every lunchtime and after school. Some even ask if they can take it home with them.”
And, in a sense, that’s what they do. Students and teachers can actually download the software to their home computers via the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community* and over 500,000 students and teachers worldwide have already downloaded almost one million copies. The community itself is also highly active, with members from more than 18,000 schools across 139 countries and it has just received the Further Education & Skills Digital Content Award at the 2009 BETT Awards.
It is not just in secondary schools that this innovative approach is making an impact. The curriculum is also being taught in some of engineering’s most prestigious universities and further education establishments across Europe; for example, at the Technische Universitat in Munich as part of its entrepreneurship programme. Autodesk is also working on a creativity curriculum and creative teaching strategy with the recently founded Warwick Digital Labs, part of the University of Warwick.
On a broader level, students taking part in the long-running Formula Student, single seat racing car design and build competition can download the Autodesk Formula Car Design Curriculum free-of-charge. This resource provides powerful, learning tools for Inventor which help teams create more innovative designs and achieve more success on the race track.
Perhaps the current economic reality check will mean more students opt for courses such as engineering of their own accord. However, teaching children that design is as much about aesthetics and original thinking as dry calculations and constant re-checking, could help turn the tide.
Richard Blatcher
Autodesk
* www.autodesk.co.uk/edcommunity
On the subject of post-industrialism, which has been covered in recent newsletters, we received these thoughts from Charles Clarke following his reading of Bob Dobson's article, published last week:
Congratulations on setting an interesting hare running with your comments on Post Industrialism: like you, I wholeheartedly commend Bob Dobson’s article. His observations are usefully provocative but above all he deserves full marks for reflecting broadly and for setting out his arguments logically. I found his English clear, grammatically sound and without an acronym in sight (I have let him off “the UK”). This means that the article is accessible beyond the engineering community and I believe is an example of how engineers, whose outreach skills are often criticised, should be making their points.
Weighing in support of Bob’s thesis was a talk given at the Royal College of Art’s Open Day last summer. Facts were presented revealing the ratio of the number of engineering/ industrial design graduates being turned out from China and India compared to those from the United Kingdom. I recall it was two or more orders of magnitude. While recognising their high quality and in some cases exceptional talents, it would be arrogant and, with such statistics, irrational to hang onto a belief that our home-grown graduates could enable high-value design work to be preserved as a United Kingdom specialism. True, in the dichotomy between niches and globalisation (which love it or hate it has a tendency to swallow up all but the largest), branding could be the joker of fortune. We can but hope!
Bob links the cycle of manufacturing to education. I can contribute an uncomfortable anecdote from a recent experience of marketing a product designed for helping children to concentrate on their homework - there were no leg irons! The take up in the United Kingdom was small while that in Sweden was the highest. This correlates with the Child Poverty Action Group’s wellbeing index (research carried out at the University of York) in which Holland and Sweden were ranked 1st and 2nd leaving the United Kingdom ranked 24th.
Certainly within the United Kingdom, there was a disconnect between disposable wealth (very crudely assessed by expensive cars and trainers) and our sales yet the sales were good to new immigrant families (high educational ambition). My concern is that the hedonism of today’s parents may result in the United Kingdom being revisited with the less attractive sector of Bob’s manufacturing cycle wherein the mucky stuff is dished out to the less well–educated nations. Of all nations, we should have seen the video!
Charles Clarke
c.clarke@those-engineers.co.uk
Thank you to everyone who took the trouble to contact us about this issue.