Global Engineering Challenge: Content

Explore what makes teamwork successful in engineering projects, including communication, coordination, shared purpose and trust. Activities highlight good and bad team behaviours, the value of diverse perspectives, and how to recognise strengths, support weaknesses, and improve through reflection and feedback.

Practical tools for adopting inclusive practices in interdisciplinary teamwork. Activities use the A–E prompts and examples of “bringing in” and “shutting out” behaviours to help students recognise their responsibilities and the benefits of supporting equality, diversity and inclusion.

Create a visual map of the problem situation, showing processes, stakeholders and influences. This activity supports understanding of the wider social, cultural, sustainability and inclusion factors that shape engineering challenges.

STEEPLE helps students explore the wider influences on a design problem by considering Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal and Ethical factors. This supports understanding of the broader context, including sustainability, diversity, inclusion and societal impacts.

SMART aims define a clear engineering question by making it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This supports identifying user requirements, constraints and the key focus of the complex design problem.

Proposing and Building describe complementary behaviours used during inclusive ideation. Proposing involves introducing a new idea into the discussion, while Building focuses on developing, adapting or strengthening ideas already offered. Together, these behaviours support the generation of actionable and well-considered solutions.

A decision matrix involves defining objective criteria, assigning weightings and scoring each conceptual design against these criteria. The combined scores provide a transparent and evidence-based comparison that supports selecting the most appropriate design option.

Risk management involves identifying, evaluating and mitigating risks associated with implementation, maintenance and project cost. The approach includes defining likelihood and severity, and applying the identify, analyse, prioritise, own, respond and monitor framework.

Understanding the finance is important when determining a project's feasibility. One method to quantify financial viability is to calculate the “payback.” The concepts of fixed costs, variable costs, revenue, and payback are introduced, and example calculations are provided. Uncertainty in the payback prediction is also described.

Ethics provides tools for examining how engineering decisions affect people and society. The content introduces ethical frameworks—consequentialist, non-consequentialist and agent-centred—which offer different ways to understand motivations and evaluate complex dilemmas.

A qualitative framework for evaluating the sustainability of a design using the triple-bottom-line perspective, considering environmental, social, economic and circular-economy aspects. The material introduces life-cycle thinking as a way to understand where impacts occur across a product's system and as a foundational concept for more detailed life-cycle analysis.

Inclusive design draws on principles of accessible, universal and inclusive approaches to ensure a design can be used by a wide range of people. The content introduces a framework for reviewing designs by analysing product demands, user abilities, key criteria and opportunities for adjustment, supported by continuous feedback across the design lifecycle.

The principles of slide design, structuring a presentation, communicating numerical data and characteristics of effective delivery. It also includes approaches for managing presentation anxiety and practical tips for presenting information clearly and engagingly.