Students taking part in this year’s Scotland Gold project visited the University of Glasgow on the 28th of February for a brilliant workshop kindly led by Dr Ian Taylor, Head of Aerospace Engineering within the James Watt School of Engineering. The pupils met staff and students from various departments within the university and had an opportunity to practice presenting their projects ahead of the final deadline.
EDT joined one team on the tour to see what it was all about. The team first visited the robotics lab, where a PhD student showed them an AI robot and discussed various projects that students studying within the robotics field have undertaken. They were then taken to a biomedical lab, where the use of electrical stimulation in the rehabilitation of neural patients was demonstrated. The students watched in awe as the researchers connected themselves to electrodes and their hands moved involuntarily! Following this, they heard from the university’s racing team who have recently had lots of success competing within the university racing league. Dr Taylor then showed the team his aerospace lab, including a wind tunnel and flight simulator that current university students use for their flight investigations.
Finally, the student rocketry team spoke with the pupils about their society, where they build and test working rockets. The team had some fantastic questions for the staff and students throughout the day and we were impressed by the STEM knowledge of the young people.
The Scotland EDT Team (and our visiting guests from England) were inspired by the effort and innovative thinking from every pupil seen within their projects. Dr Taylor organised a great day and we are sure that the pupils would fit right in should they choose to study a STEM subject at the university.
EDT would like to thank Dr Taylor for hosting the workshop, as well as thank the university staff and students who gave up their time to show the pupils the facilities. Thanks to Leonardo, Thales, Sparrows, Coherent, Three60 Energy and Arup for their sponsorship and for creating the project briefs.