Tag Archives: Engineering

Popping balloons

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Balloons ready for popping

Balloons ripe for popping!

Each year in my thermodynamics class I have some fun popping balloons and talking about irreversibilities that occur in order to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.  The popping balloon represents the unconstrained expansion of a gas and is one form of irreversibility.  Other irreversibilities, including friction and heat transfer, are discussed in the video clip on Entropy in our MOOC on Energy: Thermodynamics in Everyday Life which will rerun from October 3rd, 2016.

Last week I was in Florida at the Annual Conference of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM) and Clive Siviour, in his JSA Young Investigator Lecture, used balloon popping to illustrate something completely different.  He was talking about the way high-speed photography allows us to see events that are invisible to the naked eye.  This is similar to the way a microscope reveals the form and structure of objects that are also invisible to the naked eye.  In other words, a high-speed camera allows us to observe events in the temporal domain and a microscope enables us to observe structure in the spatial domain.  Of course you can combine the two technologies together to observe the very small moving very fast, for instance blood flow in capillaries.

Clive’s lecture was on ‘Techniques for High Rate Properties of Polymers’ and of course balloons are polymers and experience high rates of deformation when popped.  He went on to talk about measuring properties of polymers and their application in objects as diverse as cycle helmets and mobile phones.

A big question for engineers

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galleyhead lightThe proportion of women graduating with engineering degrees in the UK and US has remained around a sixth for at least the last thirty years despite many campaigns to achieve gender equality.  One of my colleagues, Professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, writing in the New Statesmen asked whether it will take another world war to get more women into engineering.  I think that the sort of seismic shift in attitude caused by such events will be required.  Many in the engineering profession claim that problem-solving is a unifying skill, which is common to all branches of engineering, and yet we have been unable to solve the problem that our profession is one of the least gender diverse.  Does this mean that we have not really been trying to solve the problem, or that we are not the problem-solvers we claim to be?

Sources:

Landivar LC, Disparities in STEM employment by sex, race and Hispanic origin, US Census Bureau, September 2013

 

Entropy in poetry

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WIN_20140716_190901 (2)Few weeks ago I mentioned about reading undergraduate dissertations [see my post entitled ‘A Startling Result‘ on May 18th, 2016] and about a year ago I wrote about the low quality of prose produced by engineers [see my post entitled ‘Reader, Reader, Reader‘ on April 15th, 2015 ].  Coleridge described prose as words in the best order and poetry as the best words in the best order. So today I’d like to direct you to a poem entitled ‘Entropy‘ by Neil Rollinson from his anthology ‘Spanish Fly’.  Here are a few lines from it:

“I open the window, the sky is dark
and the house is also cooling, the garden,
the summer lawn, all of it finding an equilibrium.”

I came across it while reading an anthology called ‘A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science‘ edited by Maurice Riordan and Jon Turney.  I was dipping into it while enjoying a pint in our backyard after a personal battle with entropy: painting rusting railings in our yard.

I was reviewing ‘A Quark for Mister Mark’ as potential reading material for a module on Technical Writing as part of our new CPD programme on Advanced Technical Skills.

Engaging learners on-line

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Filming at Quarry Bank Mill

Filming at Quarry Bank Mill

The Everyday Engineering Examples page of this blog continue to be very popular.  More than 70 engineering schools in the USA have signed up to use this approach to teaching engineering science as part of the ENGAGE project.  The lesson plans on that page assist instructors to deliver traditional lectures that are engaging and effective.  Now, we have transferred the approach to online delivery in a MOOC that was designed to support undergraduate learning as well as to increase public engagement and understanding of engineering science.

The MOOC entitled ‘Energy: Thermodynamics in Everyday Life‘ was completed by more than 960 learners from about 35 countries who ranged in age from 13 to 78 years old with a correspondingly wide range of qualifications in terms of both subject and level.  I believe that this is the first MOOC to use Everyday Engineering Examples within a framework of the 5E lesson plans and it seems to have been effective because the completion rate was 50% higher than the average for FutureLearn MOOCs.

We also included some experiments for MOOC learners to do at home in their kitchen.  Disappointingly only a quarter of learners performed the experiments but surprisingly almost half of all learners(46%) reported that the experiments contributed to their understanding of the topics.  This might be because results and photos from the experiments were posted on a media wall by learners.  There was also a vibrant discussion throughout the five-week course with a comment posted every 8 minutes (or more than 6,500 comments in total).

More than half the undergraduates (53%) who followed the MOOC did not continue to attend the traditional lectures and roughly the same percentage agreed or agreed strongly that the MOOC could replace the traditional lecture course with only 11% disagreeing.  So maybe the answer to my question about death knell for lectures [see my post ‘Death Knell for the lecture?‘ on October 7th, 2015] is that I can hear the bell tolling.

I gave a Pecha Kucha 20×20 on these developments at an International Symposium on Inclusive Engineering Education in London last month, which is available as a short video.