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Benefits and challenges of working as an effective team.
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.
Building inclusive team habits that support equality, diversity and respect.
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.
Visualising the wider context of a complex design problem.
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.
A tool to consider the broader context of the design problem.
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.
Developing and refining ideas through collaborative discussion.
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 structured method to objectively decide the best conceptual design.
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.
Financial analysis on the feasibility of a project.
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.
Life cycle thinking of the environmental, social and economic impact of a design.
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