How do you use the equipment supplied by TecQuipment?
As senior lecturer in the school of engineering at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David based in Swansea, I teach the engineering science provision across all of our engineering courses. That can be anything from a degree apprenticeship to the usual full time bachelor of engineering.
The university teaches a range of subjects but our most popular subjects are our motorsport and motorcycle engineering courses, and this is where products purchased from TecQuipment are used.
We use the equipment supplied by TecQuipment to break up a typical lecture theatre chalk and talk lesson. Instead of sitting in a lecture theatre and a static lesson which is a lot of me talking and students listening, we use the equipment to make it a more interactive lesson. We also believe that mixing lectures with practical exercises gives the students more contextualisation so they can visualise the practical element of our theoretical lessons.
What is it like inside your engineering science lab?
The engineering science lab is a really useful facility, used across a range of levels across our programmes today to demonstrate multiple theoretical concepts in a practical way. It allows many students to connect the theory and lessons taught in class with something practical to help them visualise what is being talked about. This semester, for our assessments, the students will be using the Tensile Tester (ES6) and the Potential and Kinetic Energy Kit (ES9).
Personally, the compact nature of the Tensile Tester (ES6) makes it a really lovely piece of equipment that allows students to investigate the tensile properties of different materials. Students can test four different samples: a Steel, Aluminium, Aluminium HE30 and a PVC specimen, understanding the strength of these materials and how they react to the applied load is very important in motorcycle and motorsport engineering. Equally, this equipment is a good precursor to our larger Tensile Tester; the students can use TecQuipment’s Tensile Tester (ES6) to find the yield strength, tensile strength and elongation of different materials and understand why this is important. This knowledge can then be used and scaled up for use on our larger Tensile Tester and will help the students realise why different materials are used when designing vehicles.
Similarly, with the Potential Energy Kit (ES9) purchased, this is a lovely item that enables students to do very repeatable experiments focused on understanding potential and kinetic energy in pendulums, springs and flywheels. Incidentally, easily my favourite item that comes with the kit is the magnetic ruler that just does its job really well and really helps students accurately perform experiments. With this kit students gather data and calculate the inertia of the little flywheel and pulley assembly. In the worksheets provided by TecQuipment information about the experiment and the nominal values are provided. This is great because it gives the students a definite value to look for and they can find the experimental value and compare this to the nominal value. This validation is something we love in engineering at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Why the Engineering Science Worksheets provided are useful for the University of Wales Trinity Saint David?
The really great thing about the engineering science kits is that they come with worksheets that enables students to do a bit of independent learning. Students follow the instructions and, as there are minimal health and safety issues, get to set up the kit, perform the experiments and collect the data themselves while being supervised in the classroom. These worksheets are really great as they are very self-explanatory and easy to follow with very simple step-by-step explanations of how to carry out an experiment. This is great especially for apprentice or foundation lessons as it removes barriers to learning for them. What I like to do in my lessons is have the students fill in the blank results table in the worksheets, then I get them to go and create their own spreadsheets and generate graphs themselves.
Furthermore, the worksheets are a massive time saver for short lab sessions and their prescriptiveness enable the tasks to be carried out easily and confidently by the students. From the lessons taught and textbooks read they can perform experiments and calculate energy conservation, energy storage, Hooke’s Law, Spring Rate Test, Potential Energy, Kinetic Energy and more using the information and tables provided in the worksheets.
Personally, the worksheets also make marking easier as students can focus on particularly relevant areas of a topic which are easily identifiable from the data generated from the worksheets.
Why is practical learning important to the University of Wales Trinity Saint David?
Practical experiments are very useful in helping to prepare students for assessments. Using the Tensile Tester Kit (ES6) and the Potential and Kinetic Energy Kit (ES9) enables us as an educational provider to meet quite a few of our AHEP learning outcomes from our IMechE accreditation, which is very useful and all integrated nicely. AHEP learning outcomes are key areas that are set out by the Engineering Council (the regulatory body for the UK engineering profession) and our programme's ability to address them is assessed when we have our IMechE accreditation. Some of the outcomes assess a student’s ability to address the practical application of engineering theories, and the TecQuipment Engineering Science kits really help with meeting these outcomes.
Furthermore, we pride ourselves on the amount of hands on work our students get as part of our course delivery. It is what makes our graduates distinctive and companies within the industry recognise that our graduates have that practical experience. This improves the student’s employability as demonstrated by 98% of them going on to employment or post graduate study within 15 months of leaving us.
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This blog highlights how motorcycle and motorsport engineering students at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David teach using the Tensile Tester Kit (ES6) and the Potential and Kinetic Energy Kit (ES9). If you would like to see how other universities, colleges, or training centres use products in the Engineering Science range, click on this link.
If you have been inspired to find out more about these products, click on the links below:
Potential and Kinetic Energy Kit (ES9)
If you want to share your experience using one of TecQuipment’s pieces of practical teaching equipment, let’s have a talk: marketing@tecquipment.com