UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Interest in materials education is increasing strongly, judging by the attendance at the symposium held at Nuremberg recently as part of the big Euromat conference. Audiences of 50 and at times more than 100 gathered to listen to, and question, speakers such as Mike Ashby, Sybrand van der Zwaag and Jurgen Hirsch and others from nine European countries.
A major theme for several of the speakers was the possibility of treating education in materials from the product and its design, drilling down later into the science behind the proper choice of material.
Conventional undergraduate programmes throughout the world tackle this subject matter in the opposite direction, starting with science and ending (three or four years later) with some applications. Van der Zwaag rather amusingly commented that he had surveyed ten materials text books and found that, on average, they only dealt with applications of materials on and after page 737.
Another major theme was the increasing availability of sophisticated software to support the teaching of materials. The symposium heard about steeluniversity.com, Alumatter, DoITPoMS and the latest version of the Cambridge Engineering Selector, which together represent a huge resource to help teachers (and learners) of materials. Interestingly every one of these developments came from the UK, although a symposium poster from Paris did describe a web resource to support a materials programme in the School of Mines.
The symposium also heard about a number of developing initiatives which are interacting with materials education, including FAME, CDIO, Bologna, UKCME, Matter, IISI. Details of all of these (and the software mentioned above) can be found in a couple of clicks by searching this website or Google.
