Final year and postgraduate students in the School of Engineering showcased their projects for fellow students, visitors and tutors including interactive story boards for children in Applied Computing and a design for a solar powered ATM in Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics. Claire Jones created a story making application on a personal digital assistant (PDA) to be used by children to produce stories in the classroom. The new invention encourages group work, reinforces work taught in class and is fun for the children to use.
The application was designed by children for use by children of the age group seven to ten. At each stage of the design and production a group of children of primary five age were asked to test the software to see if they liked it - their suggestions were then built into the next version.
Alex Gibson has produced a Virtual Interactive Learning Environment that students use to access lecture notes and keep up to date with course materials. He has called it VILE! It features: student to student communication, student to tutor communication, interactive blackboard, and a virtual classroom supporting streaming audio and video distance learning via the virtual classroom.
Other projects include an image segmentation system, an online citation manager, a multi-lingual web site, a graphical interface for a planetary surface simulator, and a startracker.
Maheshwur Dayal developed a solar powered Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) that does not need a connection to a standard grid supply outlet. Maheshwur explains: "In remote, under-developed regions existing supply outlets are inadequate for reliable ATM operation. To allow customers in such locations to have access to full ATM facilities, an alternative source of power such as that provided by solar energy is desirable."
Also on show at the engineering exhibition: Chalermpol Saiprasert developed a system to test the thickness of banknotes. Devices like these could be used to prevent the millions of pounds worth of fraud that takes places in the UK each year.
Final year and postgraduate engineering students exhibited some of their latest innovations in tissue engineering. Sean Joseph showed his project on the fabrication of high aspect ratio miscrostructures and Darren MacIntosh explained to visitors his investigation of soft-lithography applications in tissue engineering.