Outreach

Women in Engineering – Experience is Everything

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Lucy Osborne

This is the third in a series of posts by some of the women in CUER, writing about how they came to study engineering, what their experiences have been and how we can encourage more girls to pursue science, engineering, technology and maths. These posts were inspired by the amazing reception we had at the High Performance Antenna Live festival at the Science Museum on International Women’s Day.

Part 1

Part 2

So this is the next instalment in a series of blog posts about women in engineering, previously you may have read accounts from both PhD student Lucy Fielding and also fellow Newnhamite and first year engineer, Sarah Barrington. Both raised many interesting points about being a woman in the engineering world and I simply want to share with you my journey into engineering.

Despite engineering having always been around me (many family members being various types of engineers including my father), I wasn’t really aware of what it actually was until I had decided to do it. Choosing a career path can be an incredibly daunting process and since I had never really thought about what I wanted to do with my life it was hard to know …
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Women in Engineering- Times of Change

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Sarah Barrington

This is the second in a series of posts by some of the women in CUER, writing about how they came to study engineering, what their experiences have been and how we can encourage more girls to pursue science, engineering, technology and maths. These posts were inspired by the amazing reception we had at the High Performance Antenna Live festival at the Science Museum on International Women’s Day.

Part 1

Whenever my friends or colleagues ask me, so what exactly is engineering? Even I struggle to answer.

Yes, the Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures’, but what does this tell us of the massive impact engineers have on pretty much everything in our everyday lives? The hard work and meticulous calculation they implement in order to better society as a whole?

So this might explain why I didn’t grow up expecting to be an Engineer- I was never really sure what I’d be letting myself in for. I’m not from a particularly scientific background, although my dad has been a fantastic engineer all his working life. Therefore to me, engineering was just something …
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Women in Engineering – Women of Valour

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

This is the first in a series of posts by some of the women in CUER, writing about how they came to study engineering, what their experiences have been and how we can encourage more girls to pursue science, engineering, technology and maths. These posts were inspired by the amazing reception we had at the High Performance Antenna Live festival at the Science Museum on International Women’s Day.

Apparently, I’m a ‘woman engineer’.

I’ve always found this phrasing a little unwieldy, and it’s starting to crop up more and more: ‘woman lawyer’, ‘woman doctor’ (not to be confused with ‘gynaecologist’), ‘woman scientist’. I’m not sure when people started specifying the genders of their educated professionals like this. After all, we don’t talk about a ‘man teacher’, ‘man secretary’, or ‘man nurse’. The closest we get is ‘male nurse’, which at least employs an adjective. Although I’m not sure that makes it any better.

Nevertheless – I am, indeed, an engineer who is a woman. I didn’t always intend to be. I was six when Jurassic Park came out, and this was when I first learned you could do dinosaurs as a job. Of course, while growing up, I also toyed …
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Posted in Blog, Outreach, Students, Women in Engineering | 13 Comments

Gadget Show Live at the NEC

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Anastasia Bykova

Another exciting week in the world of Cambridge University Eco Racing! A few team members are having fun with the press and the general public, whilst the rest are extremely busy trying to balance working for their degrees and building the solar car.

All this week we are displaying Endeavour and the model of our latest vehicle at the Gadget Show Live in the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham.

We have already had a great few days at the Show, meeting hundreds of enthusiastic and interesting people, as well as learning about new products. There is still time to come up and see us this weekend, but otherwise – I am sure that we will be somewhere else quite exciting again soon.

Keep following us on twitter @CUERSolarTeam for more updates.…
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Posted in Blog, Events, Outreach | Tagged aleksi, anastasia bykova, andrew zhao, birmingham, Endeavour, Gadget Show Live, NEC, outreach, yang | Leave a comment

Night at the Museum

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Alice Taylor

There is no experience that quite matches walking through a deserted museum.

Let alone walking through a museum with a solar powered car that has raced across the Outback twice.

As I’m sure you are aware, dear reader, Endeavour recently took a trip to the London Science Museum.

Arguably the most challenging part of the weekend was getting Endeavour in and out the exhibition space. We were based in the Antenna Live gallery which has a large amount of seats fixed to the floor. Great for weary parents. Less good for manoeuvring a 240kg solar powered car into position at 9 o’clock at night.

But if CUER can build a car as good as our new concept, we can get Endeavour into the London Science Museum. Right?…
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The Future of: Solar Cars

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Helena Barman

Last week we hosted an outreach event in the Engineering Department, a seminar by a number of our senior team members entitled ‘The Future of Solar Cars’. Over 50 people came, a large number of them were 6th formers, who were keep to find out what goes into designing a solar car and the wider context of sustainable transport for the future. It was great to inspire a mixture of sixth-formers, parents, engineers and children from the Cambridge area. Thank you all very much for coming, your challenging questions at the end definitely kept us on our toes!

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Science Museum Day 3: Over and out

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Helena Barman

Our third and final day at the Science Museum was a day full of highlights.

It was also the finale to a wonderful festival (High Performance) celebrating the extraordinary achievements of women in science and technology!

Thank you very much from the positive feedback we’ve received. A vast array of people who came to see us: people from Germany, China, France, New York…. Of all ages and experiences from car designers at Peugeot designers to the young solar car engineers at Ardingly College, to the Mums who came on Mother’s Day. Youngsters such as Ava, Freddie, Merlis and Lenny came up with original ideas for future vehicle; they may just have designed us our next solar car. Thank you one and all for coming to see us!

Stomp

We learnt a lot from the public too, their perceptions on solar technology, and how they thought electric and solar vehicles might be incorporated into our future. We also learnt that our Nomex honey comb which we’ll be using in our carbon fibre sandwich is very strong indeed, as tested by our youngest new team members! All looks very scientific! Our materials were also put through more stringent tests. The most challenging being …
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Science Museum Day 2: The Ultimate Objective

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Sarah Barrington

Our second day at the Science Museum saw a significantly less hectic start to the day. After quickly setting up our exhibit and facing another hoard of photographs with Endeavour (no, we can’t ‘pose like Charlie’s Angels’!) we were set to face another busy day sharing our project with hundreds more excited museum visitors.

Our first visitors were a group of primary school children who were incredibly bright and enthusiastic and came up with some great questions to test our knowledge of the car. They also enjoyed having a look at all of the samples we’ve brought with us this weekend; examining a few examples of the materials we’re using on the car and also having a look at some of the tyres we considered when designing it.…
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Science Museum Day 1: One-and-a-Half Engineers

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

Never have I felt more solidarity with the cast of Jurassic Park than I did yesterday evening. After a two-hour session packing the Land Cruiser and collecting Endeavour, Technical Director Yang and I arrived at Lord’s Bridge Farm. It was dark. It was pouring with rain. There was mud everywhere. Through this all, I squelched, attempting to unlock stiff gates and drag them open without falling into muddy puddles or tripping over the rusty remains of long-dead radio telescopes or being eaten by a tyrannosaur. All this for a sample of carbon fibre – and we were off to the London Science Museum. Two and a half hours behind schedule.

All in all, not the best start to what should be a fantastic weekend. CUER has been invited to the Science Museum to participate in a three-day festival entitled High Performance – a celebration and a promotion of women in science, engineering and technology. Today is International Women’s Day, an appropriate date to launch the festival, and this is a great way to highlight the achievements and potential of women in male-dominated fields.

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E-Luminate Festival

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Keno

When was the last time you thought about light? As our designs are progressing quickly from wacky ideas to a full race vehicle, light is something that we’ve all been thinking about increasingly: “How can we track the sun better to get a bit more light?”; “How will light affect the temperatures inside the car?”; “How will the car perform under harsher Australian light?”. However, it occurred to us last week that not many people actually stop to think about the stuff that is everywhere and all around us: light.

Last week was the first ever E-Luminate Festival. This was a five-day light festival in Cambridge, celebrating the collaboration between light and clean technology. Dotted around Cambridge were greenhouses, churches, streets, shop windows and even parts of the Grand Arcade Shopping Centre, all bathed in beautiful light displays and light based artwork for five days to celebrate the festival.