2023 International CDIO Conference - Krys Bangert's Blog

In June this year Krys Bangert and Joanna Bates attended and presented at the 19th International Conceiving, Designing, Implementing & Operating (CDIO) conference hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

The CDIO Initiative organises the annual International CDIO Conference in June and a Fall meeting each year, it is the largest meeting of the year and includes presentation of papers and other special seminars, workshops, events and activities. All aspects of the conference are associated with providing a framework for engineering education that stresses engineering fundamentals set in the context of real-world systems and products. This methodology has a lot of similarities to the University of Sheffield’s approach to engineering tuition (and MEE in particular), because of this it was selected by the MEE’s Research Support Group (RSG) as an excellent event to attend to share and learn about best teaching practices.

The first day of the conference had a focus on teaching workshops. I attended a session on challenge based learning titled “Student-driven Engineering Education: Design Your Own Living Lab Case” by Toine Andernach, Anita van Oosten and Remon Rooij. As part of this I joined a team with members from Montreal University (Canada) and TUDelft (Netherlands) to brainstorm and create an engineering course with emphasis on sustainability. This was interesting to hear from the other institutions how they currently conduct these types of projects, many with similar frameworks the UoS’s GEC (Global Engineering Challenge)/ EYH (Engineering You’re Hired). The second workshop covered content related to the application of UNESCO’s sustainability competencies. This was a framework I’d not heard of before, so it was good to learn more about this approach and how it relates to teaching sustainability in engineering.

In the evening we were invited to the conference dinner, which was hosted at the Frimurerlogen hall.

On the second day of the conference I was due to present some research I had been working on with Edward Browncross, Matteo Di Benedetti, Harry Day and Andrew Garrard on the theme of “Comparing XR and digital flipped methods to meet learning objectives”. This study builds upon existing work carried out in the field of virtual labs, that indicates these experiences can help reinforce student learning outcomes. Essentially our study was a comparison of student learning performance in response to exposure to three different types of simulation that we made in house: a Web Browser-Based “low fidelity” Simulation, a Stanford University Platform iLabs 2D Simulation and a Low Fidelity - Unity iVR (immersive Virtual Reality), see below left to right.

As part of the conference program I had to present a “60 second elevator pitch” in the main auditorium to the entire conference following the keynote speaker, which was rather daunting but mine seemed to go down well with the delegates (see photos below).

After everyone was finished presenting, everyone moved to the conference atrium for the poster exhibition. I’d been working with the conference organisers to arrange a demonstration of the software in the study alongside the poster itself, which incorporated a VR headset that I had brought with me. The response was amazingly positive, I had a constant crowd of delegates to talk to about aspects of the study and how to progress it moving forward to the main study in September. Some of the conversations went on so long I nearly missed the delegate lunch! But it was worthwhile as I made some very useful contacts in universities in Sweden, Estonia and the Netherlands, the latter of which at TUDelft, I subsequently arranged to have an online meeting in September to scope out possible future collaborations with other teams within MEE.

The next day I attended more presentations, one of which was very interesting regarding technical staff career progression, given by the CDIO Centre for Innovative Teaching & Learning at Singapore Polytechnic University. Titled “Advancing CDIO Competencies for Technicians – a Professional Development Framework” by Mark Nivan Singh, Sin Moh Cheah and Helene Leong, their talk was about their journey of getting technical staff recognition for the work they carry out and how it is important to the institution. I’m looking forward to reading their paper when it is released digitally later this year, as there are many aspects that are applicable to the current University push for technical commitments.

In the late morning Joanna gave her presentation on “Induction Diamond Labs - Giving Everyone an Equal Starting Point”, showcasing the work she had done alongside Andrew Garrard and Edward Browncross.  Joanna gave a great talk about how we carry out induction labs and the MEE approach to mass teaching. This highlighted the efficiency gains on staff time, setup time and educational delivery versus transitional teaching models.

Other talks of note were from Calvin Rans at TUDelft University on “The Student Flight Data Recorder – Building a Culture of Learning from Failure”. Which was a unique approach to getting aerospace students to plan their studies and reflect on what they achieved throughout their course. I managed to get a copy of their teaching “journal” that they use for this activity, which is of impressive quality.

Serdar Asut (right) also from TUDelft presented on “HANDZONe: Towards a Hybrid Learning Space for Hands-on Learning Activities”, which was all about using remote access control of physical lab equipment and also using VR models. A lot of work similar to this is also being carried out within our department right now, so following the talk we met to discuss a collaboration (mentioned previously) on the VR aspects plus with Panos’s research group in MEE.

On the final day another highlight was the talk given by Ivanna Sandyk (right) from Tallinn University in Estonia on “Pneumatics Laboratory Interactive Educational Experience Development”. Their research group was creating a modular virtual reality hydraulic system for teaching, that allowed students to assemble components in any way they saw fit to meet learning objectives (i.e. solving a proposed engineering problem). This research has some similarities to the virtual models for the fluids lab that Andrew and I have worked on previously. Following the talk I swapped contact details with Ivanna to see if we could share ideas.

One of the last events I attended was the Pop-up Roundtable on “SUPER Assessor – A Game developed for integration of sustainability in learning design” by Ole Andreas Alsos, Ingrid Berg Sivertsen, Dag Håkon Haneberg, and Åshild Wilhelmsen of NTNU, Norway. This session was a gamification of curriculum design using a board game of their own design. Each participant has a secret objective such as “promote industry collaboration”, “minimise costs” etc, and a theme is selected for the curriculum you would like to design. Each participant then plays some cards of defined categories i.e. “Who is assessed”, “Assessment format” that have different methods on them. Each play, the participants can add or remove other previously played cards for x number of rounds until the cards are all played. This forces iterative design until an optimised curriculum is designed. It was fun and actually quite effective at creating new strategies. I managed to get a copy of the prototype game for the department too, so I’m hoping to have a play with some of the team over the summer.

We had the following day to recover and do some sign seeing in the town before setting off on the long journey back. Overall, the trip was very productive and Norway is a beautiful country. I would heartily recommend anyone interested in pedagogy to attend in future if you get the chance.