About Global Engineering Challenge
The Global Engineering Challenge (GEC) is a week-long, team-based project for all first-year engineering students. You will work with students from different engineering disciplines to tackle a real-world problem.
The week gives you the opportunity to apply your engineering knowledge in a new context, develop key transferable skills sought by employers, and work with people you would not normally encounter on your degree programme.
You will be expected to take part from 9am to 5pm each day. This is intended to replicate the experience of working in industry. GEC is assessed, but all of the time needed to complete the assessments is provided during the working day, so you will not need to work outside normal working hours.
Key themes of GEC are multidisciplinary teamwork, inclusivity, sustainability and designing 'with', rather than designing 'for', people and communities.
What do I need to do?
You will be provided in advance with all the information you need to engage with the week.
Your first task will be to select your project preferences. Before the Christmas break, you will receive an email asking you to rank the projects you would most like to work on. We use these preferences, alongside information used to create diverse multidisciplinary teams, to allocate students to projects and teams. The project week team will do their best to allocate you to a project you want to work on.
When the groups are formed, you will be emailed with your team and 'hub' number. A hub is a collection of teams, and each hub has a room, a postgraduate facilitator, a Blackboard page and a member of Faculty staff. You will need to know your hub number and hub room before the week begins.
Your next task is simply to show up to the first session on the first day of the project week. During the first morning, you will be given the instructions you need for the rest of the week, and your facilitator will be there to support you. From there, you will be guided through the project by your facilitator and the teaching materials provided. You do not need to prepare the solution in advance or already be an expert in the subject of your project.
Before the Christmas break, the GEC website will be populated with detailed information and made available through Blackboard. It will contain information about the content, timetable, assessment and a comprehensive student FAQ covering most enquiries and scenarios. If the information you need is not provided there, please talk to your module leader.
Who will I be working with?
Your GEC team will normally contain five or six students, and most of them are likely to be studying a different engineering discipline from you. You may not know the other members of your team before the week begins.
This is deliberate.
The teams are not simply created at random. We use an optimisation algorithm to create diverse teams while also taking account of students' project preferences. The aim is to give students a fair opportunity to work in teams containing a mixture of people, disciplines, backgrounds and experiences.
We also use the team-forming process to avoid concentrating particular groups of students into a small number of teams and to create as equitable an experience as possible across the whole cohort.
Why are the teams multidisciplinary?
Engineering problems rarely belong entirely to one discipline.
A civil engineer, computer scientist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer may look at the same problem in very different ways. Each brings knowledge and perspectives that the others may not have.
GEC gives you an opportunity early in your degree to experience this. You will be expected to contribute what you know, recognise where other people have expertise that you do not, and combine different ideas to develop a stronger solution.
Working with unfamiliar people can also be challenging. Learning how to establish a team, communicate with different people, manage disagreements and make decisions together is therefore part of the experience, rather than something separate from the engineering task.
It also gives you an opportunity to expand your network, make new connections and build friendships with students from across the Faculty who you might otherwise never encounter during your degree.
What will I be working on?
Your team will work on an open-ended engineering challenge based on a real-world context.
There is deliberately no single 'correct' answer. Your team will need to understand the problem, investigate its context, generate possible solutions, make choices and justify the approach you eventually take.
To do this, you will follow a design cycle (opens in a new tab), the step-by-step process engineers use to develop a solution. The phases of the design cycle are included in the descriptions of the learning content, the timetable and the learning outcomes, so you will always know where in the design cycle you are working during each activity.
The challenge is not just about finding a technically possible solution. Engineering decisions affect people, communities and the environment, so you will also need to think about the wider consequences of what you propose.
Designing 'with', not 'for'
One of the central ideas running through GEC is designing with people, rather than designing for them.
Engineers have technical expertise, but that does not mean they automatically understand the experiences, priorities or needs of the people affected by an engineering problem.
You will therefore be encouraged to consider different stakeholders, understand the context in which a problem exists and recognise the value of knowledge held by communities and other people affected by your decisions.
This connects closely with two other major themes of GEC: inclusivity and sustainability.
What skills will I develop?
GEC gives you an opportunity to practise skills that are important throughout an engineering career, including:
- teamwork;
- communication;
- problem solving;
- decision making;
- working across disciplinary boundaries;
- giving and responding to feedback;
- presenting and explaining ideas;
- considering sustainability, ethics and inclusivity;
- reflecting on your own skills and contribution.
Rather than learning about these skills in isolation, you will practise them while working with other people on a substantial engineering problem.
What will the week be like?
The week will include taught material, project development, presentations and reflection time. You will spend the week with your team and follow a timetable of activities, with support from staff in your hub room.
What are the learning outcomes?
In addition to the informal learning you will gain from working in a team on a real-world, societally relevant project, you will be assessed against two learning outcomes.
Learning Outcome 1: Demonstrate an EDI approach to working in a team and the effective use of tools and processes for designing solutions to complex problems, considering stakeholders, sustainability and inclusivity during problem definition, idea selection and solution evaluation.
Learning Outcome 2: Reflect on and record self-learning and development of skills.
These learning outcomes help to fulfil requirements for an accredited degree (AHEP) and the Sheffield Graduate Attributes (SGAs).
Working with engineers from industry
Practising engineers from a wide range of organisations support GEC as Industry Mentors.
They are there to bring a professional perspective to the week. They may challenge your thinking, ask questions, provide feedback and encourage you to consider things that your team has overlooked. Their guidance and feedback will help you develop and refine your project ideas.
They do not need to be specialists in your particular project. In professional engineering you will frequently need to explain complex work to people who do not share your exact expertise, so explaining your problem and ideas clearly is itself part of the experience.
Engineer Your Future
GEC also includes Engineer Your Future, which gives you opportunities to interact with engineers working in different roles and organisations.
You can hear about different engineering careers, ask engineers about their experiences and learn more about the routes available to you during and after your degree.
This is also an opportunity to start thinking about the skills and experiences you may want to develop during your time at Sheffield.
What will I get from GEC?
By the end of GEC, you will have experienced something quite different from most of your normal first-year teaching.
You will have worked intensively with people from other disciplines, tackled an unfamiliar and open-ended problem, made engineering decisions without knowing that there is a single correct answer, received feedback from other people and had to communicate and defend your ideas.
You will also have experiences and examples that you can draw upon later when applying for placements, internships and graduate jobs.
GEC is intended to give you an early experience of engineering as it exists beyond individual university subjects: applying knowledge to complex problems, working with other people and making decisions that affect society and the environment.
The Global Engineering Challenge (GEC) is a week-long, multidisciplinary project for all first-year engineering students in the Faculty of Engineering. Approximately 1,600 students work in small teams on real-world, open-ended problems that require them to think about technical, social, ethical and environmental considerations.
Industry involvement is an important part of the experience. Practising engineers bring a professional perspective that cannot be reproduced through academic teaching alone, helping students connect what they are doing at university with the way engineering decisions are made in practice.
Why are Industry Mentors involved?
GEC is designed to help students develop the wider skills and behaviours needed to become effective engineers. Industry Mentors help make that learning authentic by asking questions, challenging assumptions, sharing experience and giving feedback from a professional point of view.
Students benefit particularly from hearing how engineers deal with uncertainty, competing priorities, communication, teamwork, sustainability, inclusivity and stakeholder needs in real organisations.
What is the mentor role?
Your role is to engage with students, listen to their ideas, ask questions and provide constructive feedback. You may work with student teams as they develop their projects, take part in discussions about careers and professional practice, and contribute to presentation or boardroom-style activities.
Students follow a standard design cycle (opens in a new tab) throughout the week, moving through phases such as understanding the context, generating ideas and evaluating their concept. When you meet a team, they will be at a particular point in that cycle, which will shape what they have to show you and the kind of feedback that is most useful to them.
The value you bring is not simply technical expertise. Your professional judgement, experience of working with other people and knowledge of how engineering operates in practice are equally important.
Do I need to know the project in advance?
No. Industry Mentors are not expected to be experts in the students' particular project context. Students should be able to explain the problem they are addressing, the context in which it sits and the solution they are developing.
Being able to communicate technical work clearly to someone who is not already familiar with it is itself an important professional skill, so your questions and feedback are valuable even when the project sits outside your own specialism.
Engineer Your Future
GEC also includes Engineer Your Future, which gives students direct access to engineers working in a wide range of roles and organisations. The aim is to help students understand the breadth of engineering careers available to them and to connect the skills they are developing during GEC with their future professional lives.
Mentors can share their own career experiences, routes into industry, lessons learned and perspectives on the skills that matter in professional engineering.
What do students gain from mentor involvement?
For many first-year students, GEC may be one of their earliest opportunities to discuss their work directly with a practising engineer. Mentor involvement gives them external feedback, professional role models, greater confidence communicating technical ideas and a clearer understanding of what employers value.
What do mentors and organisations gain?
Supporting GEC is an opportunity to contribute directly to the development of future engineers and to engineering education at Sheffield. It can support organisational social responsibility and outreach activity, provide contact with emerging talent and strengthen links between industry and the University.
Mentors also have the opportunity to meet engineers from other organisations, reflect on their own professional experiences and develop skills in communication, feedback and supporting others. Feedback from previous mentors has consistently shown that they value the experience and believe that students benefit from their involvement.
Support for mentors
Mentors are supported by the GEC team, Faculty staff and trained postgraduate facilitators. You will be given the information you need to take part, and you are not expected to undertake significant preparation in advance.
The Global Engineering Challenge (GEC) is a Faculty-wide, first-year project-based learning experience designed to develop professional and transferable engineering skills at scale. Approximately 1,600 students from across engineering and computer science work in multidisciplinary teams on open-ended, real-world problems.
The model has been developed over fifteen years of repeated delivery and is deliberately designed around the challenge of providing a consistent, authentic educational experience to an entire engineering cohort at the same time.
Why a Faculty-wide approach?
Some parts of engineering education are discipline-specific, but many important capabilities are common to all engineers regardless of programme of study. These include teamwork, communication, ethical decision-making, sustainability, inclusivity, stakeholder awareness, reflection and multidisciplinary working.
Many of these capabilities are also reflected in accreditation requirements such as AHEP4, which apply across accredited engineering degrees. GEC provides a single Faculty-wide approach to developing these shared capabilities, rather than requiring each programme to design and deliver parallel provision independently.
This allows common professional learning to be developed once, delivered consistently and improved centrally, while programme-level teaching can concentrate on the technical and disciplinary knowledge that genuinely needs to be subject-specific.
The hub model
GEC is delivered through a distributed 'hub' model. A hub typically consists of six teams of six students, although some hubs and teams may be slightly smaller depending on the overall cohort size.
Each hub is supported by a trained postgraduate facilitator, a member of Faculty staff, dedicated teaching space and digital resources. All hubs work within the same overall structure, use common teaching materials and follow the same timetabled sequence of activities. This provides consistency across a very large cohort while keeping the student experience at a manageable local scale.
The trained facilitators allow each hub to operate as a semi-autonomous teaching unit. The central GEC team provides the educational framework, teaching materials, processes and expectations for the week, while facilitators are trained to understand the intended learning, what is essential and where they have flexibility.
Within that framework, facilitators are trusted to adapt their delivery to the needs of their students, respond to local circumstances and make appropriate decisions without routinely referring back to the central project week team. They only need to draw on the central team during teaching when an issue arises that cannot reasonably be resolved within the hub.
This semi-autonomous model is important for delivery at scale. Rather than increasing the complexity of the central operation as student numbers grow, capacity can be expanded relatively straightforwardly by adding further hubs, each with the same core structure, resources and trained local support.
Postgraduate facilitators are central to the delivery model. They are trained to lead their hub, support students, deliver teaching material and make appropriate local decisions.
This enables distributed delivery while also providing postgraduate researchers with substantial teaching experience, responsibility and professional development. Facilitator development is therefore both a mechanism for delivering GEC and an educational benefit of the model in its own right.
Diverse, multidisciplinary teams
Students are deliberately placed into multidisciplinary teams rather than working only with peers from their own programme. Teams are formed using an optimisation algorithm rather than randomly. The algorithm seeks to create diverse and equitable teams while also respecting student project preferences.
It maximises interdisciplinarity by forming teams from different degree programmes; minimises the variance in home/international student status across teams, with an aim of typically having one or two international students in each team; considers the distribution of students with Learning Support Plans so that these students are not concentrated into a small number of teams; applies a 'no lone female engineer' constraint, so teams contain either no female students or at least two; and allocates as many students as possible to their highest-ranked project preference.
This deliberate team formation is part of the educational design of GEC. It gives students experience of working in the kinds of interdisciplinary teams they are likely to encounter in professional engineering, where complex problems rarely sit within a single discipline.
It also lets students experience disciplinary interdependence early in their degree: recognising the limits of their own knowledge, drawing on and valuing the expertise of others with different discipline-specific knowledge, and combining different approaches to solve problems. Along the way, they see the benefits that diversity of thought, background and experience can bring to engineering design and decision-making.
Authentic project-based learning
GEC is built around open-ended engineering problems without a single correct answer. Students must investigate context, generate and evaluate ideas, make decisions, justify their approach and communicate their work to other people.
This gives students an authentic setting in which to practise transferable skills rather than learning about them as isolated topics. The project itself creates the need for teamwork, communication, judgement, feedback, reflection and professional decision-making.
A shared design cycle
Students work through their projects using a common design cycle (opens in a new tab) of nine phases: from forming a team and understanding the context, through defining the problem and generating, selecting and specifying a design, to planning the project, evaluating the concept and communicating the solution.
Each phase has its own colour, and that colour coding is used consistently throughout the materials students are given. The timetable, teaching content, learning outcomes and assessments all reference the relevant phase of the design cycle in its colour, so students can intuitively situate themselves within their learning journey and see where each activity sits within the wider design process.
A shared educational ethos
Sustainability, inclusivity, ethics and stakeholder awareness are embedded throughout the experience. A central principle is 'designing with, not designing for': students are encouraged to recognise that engineering expertise is only one form of expertise and that communities and stakeholders bring important knowledge of their own.
The intention is for students to consider the social and environmental consequences of engineering decisions alongside technical feasibility from the beginning of their studies.
Industry as part of the learning model
Practising engineers are embedded into GEC as Industry Mentors. Their role is to bring professional judgement, feedback and career context into the student experience, rather than simply appearing as guest speakers.
Students are required to explain their work to people outside their immediate project team, respond to professional feedback and consider how their ideas would be received in engineering practice. Engineer Your Future extends this by giving students direct access to engineers working in a wide range of roles and organisations.
Quality and efficiency at scale
Large-scale teaching amplifies small weaknesses. Ambiguous instructions, inconsistent terminology or processes that rely on ad hoc intervention can become major problems when repeated across dozens of teams and teaching spaces.
GEC therefore places particular emphasis on common resources, shared terminology, specialist teaching materials, team-allocation processes, facilitator training, industry engagement, coordinated digital infrastructure, clear escalation routes and reflection after delivery.
Scale creates a need for these robust systems, but it also makes investing in them worthwhile. A Faculty-wide approach reduces duplication between programmes and makes possible a level of investment in high-quality shared resources that would be difficult to justify for a single small cohort.
The model has also demonstrated that an immersive week of education can be delivered to a very large cohort at relatively low cost per student while maintaining local support through the hub structure.
A mature and evolving model
GEC is not a one-off intervention. It has developed through repeated delivery, feedback from students, staff and industry mentors, and formal annual reflection.
The model continues to evolve in response to changes in cohort size, curriculum structures, student needs and professional expectations. The underlying principles, however, remain stable: protected immersive time, authentic multidisciplinary problems, deliberate team formation, distributed facilitation, consistent shared resources, external professional involvement and a clear focus on the capabilities common to all engineers.
What is transferable?
GEC is not presented as a recipe that must be copied exactly. Its most transferable features are the underlying design choices: identify the learning that is genuinely common across programmes, create an authentic shared experience in which students must use those capabilities, design delivery structures for scale from the outset, and give local educators enough autonomy to respond without losing consistency.
Institutions considering a similar approach can adapt the project context, cohort structure, staffing model and assessment to their own circumstances while retaining those core principles.