Engineering outreach activities on the Medway Campus
We have a number of workshops to help with enhancing the curriculum to your pupils, from topics in computing, electronics, engineering and physics. Our faculty has an extensive range of specialist laboratories for you and your pupils to visit and utilise for the purpose of raising their aspirations.
We have developed workshops that extend the national curriculum for students in Years 10 to 13, as well as specifically assisting schools and colleges in the Extended Project or Extended Essay. Some of these workshops are portable, which also allows the faculty to deliver them at school premises if required, but the majority are laboratory based in our workshops on the Medway campus.
We have the facilities to run a number of these workshops in one day. However, if you are interested in a particular technique, it is possible to focus on one workshop to fit in with what your students are currently studying.
If you are interested in any of these techniques, please contact us at FES-courseinfo@gre.ac.uk with the subject title "Request for Study Workshop (name of workshop)".
Materials: Tensile Testing
This workshop explores materials with respect to their bulk properties and tensile strength. Tensile testing is a fundamental materials science test in which a sample is subjected to controlled tension until failure – how can you predict how a material will respond to outside forces? The use of a tensile tester with the subsequent creation of force-elongation and stress-strain curves in the laboratory can help.
Materials: Hardness Testing
The hardness of a metal is defined as the resistance to plastic deformation. There are a number of tests that measure the materials' resistance of a non-deformable ball or cone. In this workshop students will have the opportunity to investigate the effect of alloying and heat treatment on the hardness of steels and carry out measurements of hardness using a portable (rebound) hardness tester.
Electronic Circuits: Simulation and Manufacture of a System
A demonstration of circuit simulation software for the purpose of testing a circuit before any physical construction of the prototype. Detailed simulation can often reduce the time and effort involved in reaching the point of the manufacture of a circuit board and its associated components, as well as involving the consideration of the physical size and location of these components on a board as well: automate component selection and PCB layout. The type of circuit to be simulated in this workshop can range from standard components in a typical application (resistors, capacitors, diode, resistive input transducers, etc) to simple amplifiers (bipolar transistors, MOSFET's).
Embedded Computers: Raspberry-Flavours
Students will follow how an embedded computer can be used to develop simple systems and control them with simple command line instructions, graphical interfaces, or remote network access. These types of systems can capture and display video, stream content over wireless networks, or drive simple motor systems.
If you are interested in any of these techniques, please contact us at FES-courseinfo@gre.ac.uk with the subject title "Request for Study Workshop (name of workshop)".