Toddler does physics-art

As we all know, a scientifically-minded toddler plus a piece of technology can lead to unexpected results. This is the result of Benjamin playing with a retractable steel tape measure at the weekend. How we came to break the case apart I don't know, but the results are pretty (the cellphone shot in poor light […]

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Robot racing

The Engineering Design Show is currently in full swing here, with the competitions for the various design projects. The white-line followers kicked off proceedings. They were pretty impressive, with all but one team successfully being able to follow the (very squiggly) line without mistakes. There were traps to confuse the robots – the line got […]

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Getting the terminology correct

Yesterday I read a neat little report by one of our final year engineering students. As part of her final year project, she'd been looking at misconceptions in first-year students' thinking about electromagnetism. Learning about electric and magnetic fields isn't easy. For one thing, you can't actually see them. Therefore it's not at all obvious […]

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