BLOODHOUND @ University

The BLOODHOUND @ University learning support site has been developed to support and enable interaction between the Bloodhound project, university students and academic colleagues. The site will make information available about the car, the project, the design challenges and the successes, for use by staff and students at universities. They will also provide information on current problems and challenges facing the project – and would invite you to contribute to solving these problems if you are able. The BLOODHOUND project offers a unique opportunity to provide university level Engineering and Technology students with access to real design challenges and test data as the project develops.

Visit the BLOODHOUND @ University website here.

The University of the West of England (UWE) is leading the HE university level engagement activity and has set up Bloodhound@University. UWE have begun developing teaching material and projects for use with engineering and other students with colleagues from Southampton, Swansea and a growing number of other universities.

Working in collaboration with the vehicle design and build team Bloodhound@University will be able to access a wealth of information about the car. The design team will make available detailed information about the problems, the solutions developed and results from the testing -validation phases. Ultimately data from actual vehicle runs will be accessible to students and academics.

Unlike most projects though Bloodhound@University will have a “warts and all” access, so we will be able to share not only the solutions that worked, but also the ideas that did not succeed. Additionally we will have access to the design team’s decision making and evaluation criteria- why a solution was selected or rejected. It is these latter features which from an university perspective are the richest and will create an immensely powerful educational resource.

Bloodhound@University’s model for the preparation of teaching material is built upon the open source models used by the software community. In this way all those who contribute to the development of teaching materials based on the Bloodhound project will benefit in the communities shared resource. We believe this is quite a unique approach for educational development albeit common to other domains.

The challenges facing the Bloodhound project are wide and varied - covering issues such as materials technology, design analysis using computer based methods, project management, environmental assessment and impact. The close integration of the educational teams with the main design team will provide academics and students with unique opportunity access to the project as it evolves and develops.

Principles

The principle behind Bloodhound@University is that we wish to work with colleagues teaching in HE across the UK, and wider, to collectively develop teaching material based on the Bloodhound project. With support from the HE Academy we have established a Special Interest Group and will be running workshops in the coming months for academic colleagues to join with us in bringing their subject and teaching expertise to the project to develop a range of lectures, case studies, tutorial exercises and design briefs for use by the HE community.

Additionally the Bloodhound@University team plan to undertake pedagogic research as the project develops to help guide and inform others teaching and lecturing in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects in HE.