Future of engineering on display next week
20 October 2022 | The University of Waikato News
The annual event at the Hamilton campus brings all the university’s engineering years and disciplines together for two days of crazy activity. Civil, mechanical, mechatronics, chemical, environmental, electrical, materials and software engineers will showcase their multiple talents and ability to build stuff, automate stuff, fall off stuff, and pilot boats into cloudy waters.
School of Engineering Senior Lecturer Dr Tim Walmsley says it’s the only event in the country where all the different engineering disciplines come together and demonstrate real multidisciplinary collaboration by working on problems together, underscored by the huge variety of final year projects.
“A unique feature of Engineering at Waikato is the flexibility to collaborate across the disciplines – the way of the future. Our final year projects often bring together students from different engineering fields to address a real world problem in a more comprehensive way. Our agile, future-focused approach stands in contrast to the traditionally, discipline-silo projects of the older engineering schools at other NZ universities.”
Key tasks for the two day spectacle include students working together to test a 4m bridge span that must hold them up, piloting boats around the university lake to collect rubbish and, of course, the automated harvester, where students design and build machines to autonomously scale a “hill” and collect apples.
Families, prospective students and industry leaders are all expected to attend, with games and activities on offer for the younger ones.