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Short Course and Workshops
8th International Materials Education Symposium (Archived Information)

April 5-6, Cambridge University Materials Science Department

Optional short courses and workshops preceded the main Materials Education Symposium.

Tuesday & Wednesday
Wed Afternoon
Wed Afternoon
Wed Afternoon

CES EduPack Short Course

Course leader:
Prof Mike Ashby

Workshop: eLearning for the Materials World

Organisers:
Mark Endean
Andrew Green
Bill Clyne
Alec Goodyear
Noel Rutter

Workshop: Introduction to CES Selector

Organisers:
Granta Design


CES EduPack Short Course

When: April 5 (9:30-17:00); April 6 (9:00-12:30)

Organiser: Granta Design

Cost: Full Event package (£437 before Dec 31) includes this course, the Symposium, and any Wednesday Workshop.

Who is the course for?

Anyone new to the CES EduPack teaching resources, or seeking a refresher. Professors, Lecturers, and Program Directors of university and college courses related to materials and manufacturing.  The course is relevant to the following disciplines: mechanical engineering; production engineering; aerospace engineering; materials science and engineering; industrial and product design; polymer science and engineering; eco-engineering; chemical engineering; bio-engineering; and architecture and the built environment.

What is the course about?

CES EduPack has been created by Professor Mike Ashby of Cambridge University and his colleagues over the past 20 years. Both the resources that it provides and the ideas that it implements are valuable to educators across a broad range of engineering-related courses, and from first to final-year teaching. They have been used to support and reinforce existing courses that use a variety of teaching approaches and texts, as well as in the design of new courses.

At the heart of CES EduPack is a database of materials and process properties, supported by textbook-style explanations of materials attributes and behavior. This provides a rich, interactive information resource that can engage students with the world of materials. The CES EduPack software applies the information in the database, enabling exercises and projects to analyze and compare materials properties, and to select materials for engineering applications. These computer-based learning tools are augmented with PowerPoint lectures, teaching resource books, student projects and exercises, and textbooks.

The course will show, through lectures interspersed with hands-on tutorial sessions using the software, how such resources can assist materials teaching.

Note: attendees will need to bring their own laptop computers for the hands-on sessions, and will be provided with the new CES EduPack software. Please ensure this is a Windows machine and that you have administrator privileges.

Tue, April 5, Day OneIntroduction to CES EduPack

The course will consist of a series of units, each including a short lecture, a software demonstration, discussion time, and a "hands-on session" during which attendees can use the CES EduPack software. Members of the Granta education team will be present to help and to answer questions.

09:30 Registration & refreshments
10:00 Course opens—Welcome
10:05 Introductions, Teaching Resources Website and Agenda Review (Mike Ashby)
10:15 Unit 1-2: Materials, Data and Charts for CES EduPack (Mike Ashby)
11:15 Hands-on exercises
11:40 Unit 4: Manipulating Properties: composition, microstructure, architecture (Hugh Shercliff)
12:15 Hands-on exercises
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Unit 6-7: Materials Selection (Claes Fredriksson)
14:30 Hands-on exercises
15:00 Coffee & refreshments
15:30 Unit 12: Eco-selection and the Eco Audit Tool: introducing students to life-cycle thinking (Mike Ashby)
16:15 Hands-on exercises
16:45 Advanced CES EduPack Databases: Standard Level 3, Bioengineering, Polymer Aerospace and Sustainable Development (Hannah Melia)
17:15 Wrap up & discussion (Mike Ashby). Course evaluation.
17:30 Close


Weds, April 6, Day Two
Advanced Materials Selection

09:00 Registration & refreshments
09:30 Course opens—Welcome. Brief review of Day 1 (Mike Ashby)
09:45 Unit 8: Objectives in Conflict (Claes Fredriksson)
10:15 Hands-on exercises
10:30 Advanced Industrial Case Studies (interactive)
11:30 The Synthesizer tool (Dr Lee Phillips)
12:15 Wrap up & discussion (Mike Ashby). Course evaluation.
12:30 Lunch
13.15 Registration for parallel workshop sessions (CES Selector, e-Learning, Sustainability)

eLearning for the Materials World

Mark Endean, Andrew Green, Bill Clyne, Alec Goodyear, Noel Rutter

Materials and Sustainable Development

Mike Ashby, Tatiana Vakhitova

Introduction to CES Selector

Charlie Bream, Claes Fredriksson

13:30 Workshops (first half)
15.00 Coffee & refreshments
15.30 Workshops (second half)
17.00 Wrap up & discussion. Workshop evaluation
17.30 Close
17.30 Tour of the Materials Science and Metallurgy department
18.00 Travel to Clare College, Memorial Court

Workshop: eLearning for the Materials World

When: April 6, 13:30-17:30
Cost: Adds £20 to Symposium fee (covers catering and administration); included free for Short Course attendees.

Facilitators:

  • Mark Endean (Open University)
  • Andrew Green (Materials eLearning Technologies)
  • Bill Clyne (University of Cambridge)
  • Alec Goodyear (Open University)
  • Noel Rutter (University of Cambridge)
  • The materials community has led the field on the development of elearning resources. Beginning with Materials Science on CD-ROM in the 1990s and continuing to DoITPoMS, developed at the University of Cambridge, and the CORE-Materials repository of open educational resources, the materials educator has been able to draw on a very wide range of digitised content and active learning resources to incorporate in their teaching.

    Effective online learning requires careful design of learning activities based on principles that are gradually emerging from collective experience. There is a world of difference between making lecture notes and recordings accessible online and presenting materials specifically developed for students to learn from independently.

    This workshop will provide an opportunity to review your own and others’ practice in materials elearning and develop some new ideas to enhance your students’ learning experience. The workshop facilitators will introduce examples of online resources and illustrate how these are adapted into effective learning provision. You will be able to draw on and share your own experience of online learning as a teacher or learner. Then, using guidelines for good practice in online learning, you will be able to create an outline for a new learning activity to develop for your learners.

    The facilitators come from the conventional and the distance learning sectors and together have over a century of experience in developing and presenting learning in materials both traditionally and online.

    Workshop Format and Outcomes

    The workshop will interleave short presentations and demonstrations from the facilitators with small group work involving the participants. At the conclusion to the workshop, you should be able to:

    1. locate reputable online learning resources with appropriate rights clearances to incorporate in your teaching programme
    2. construct an effective short elearning experience to meet your learners’ requirements
    3. engage your immediate peer community in the issues covered by the workshop.

    Outline Program:

    Session 1 Perspectives, resources and repositories
    The online learning landscape in materials – available resources and what they provide; gaps in provision.
    Session 2

    Current eLearning practice

  • Experiences of online learning and exemplars of current practice. ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’
  • Exploring the potential for new learning activities/types of activity.
  • Session 3

    Making a plan

  • An opportunity to design/improve an elearning activity within a learning design framework used
    by the OU.
  • Building on resources identified in Sessions 1 & 2, the facilitators will work with the small groups, providing guidance and asking challenging questions.
  • Pre-course Preparation:

    The facilitators are aiming for active involvement of all participants. To gain the most from the workshop, please think about the following questions and bring with you appropriate resources to contribute to the discussions.

    1. What experience have I had as a learner of traditional distance learning and/or elearning?
    2. What have I provided to my students in the form of traditional distance learning or elearning?
    3. What have I myself already learnt about the process of learning online?
    4. What would I like to be able to present as elearning?

    Materials and Sustainable Development Workshop

    When: April 6, 13:30-17:30

    Organiser: Granta Design

    Cost: Adds £90 to Symposium fee; included free for Short Course attendees

    The workshop will be led by Professor Mike Ashby and Dr Tatiana Vakhitova.

    This workshop enables educators to go through a five-step methodology for analysing Sustainable Development articulations in the context of Materials, as well as to use resources to support teaching Sustainable Development concepts. The participants are expected to have a general knowledge of Engineering and/or Science. The methodology can be used in teaching interdisciplinary courses with politics, business and engineering students working together. The resources have been developed by Granta Design in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, Barcelona (UPC) and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. You will need a computer running Microsoft Windows to practise exercises with the software provided.

    A "sustainable development" is one that contributes in an equitable way to human welfare, doing so in a way that minimizes the drain on natural resources, complies with the rule of law, and is financially viable. Many  civil,  commercial, government, and academic projects claim to do this, and many of them have implications for materials consumption and use e.g. developing biopolymers, subsidizing electric cars, and requiring photo-voltaic (PV) panels on new residential buildings. We refer to them as "articulations" of sustainable development. But how are they to be assessed? There is no simple, "right" answer to questions of sustainable development. Instead there is a thoughtful, well-researched analysis of a proposed articulation that recognizes the concerns of stakeholders, the demands these articulations create for materials and energy, the economic, legal, and social constraints, and their environmental legacy.


    Workshop: Introduction to CES Selector

    When: April 6, 13:30-17:30

    Organiser: Granta Design

    Cost: Adds £90 to Symposium fee; included free for Short Course attendees.

    This workshop will be led by Dr Charlie Bream.

    Workshop facilitator: Claes Fredriksson

    What is the course about?

    This session provides an introduction to the CES Selector software, used in industry and research for materials selection and decision-making, and to support advanced teaching of materials.

    CES Selector is the industrial version of CES EduPack, used to select and compare materials in industry, research and advanced teaching. Here the primary aim is to help people rapidly identify candidate materials, so they can justify and focus their development efforts on the most promising solutions. To support this, CES Selector includes additional efficiency tools that let you get to results and make decisions faster and more effectively. These include the ‘Performance Index Finder’ that enables material indices to be quickly defined and plotted, the ‘Find Similar’ tool for finding drop-in replacements with minimal information on the design requirements, ‘Comparison tables’ for identifying the differences between materials or ‘key’ properties that you may have overlooked, as well as CES Constructor, a software toolkit that lets you add your own data and modify existing databases in the platform.

    In the workshop, you will see demonstrations and be able to try the software yourselves with a time-limited license. There will also be case studies showing how the tools and features can be used to solve real industrial problems. You will need a computer running Microsoft Windows to follow the exercises with the software provided.

    Attendees of this workshop will also receive a 30 day trial of CES Selector.

    More information on CES Selector »


    Course and workshop presenters

    CES EduPack Course leader: Professor Mike Ashby

    Mike Ashby, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, is a world-renowned authority on engineering materials being the author/co-author of best-selling textbooks and of over 200 papers on topics including the mechanisms of plasticity and fracture, powder compaction, mechanisms of wear, methodologies for materials selection, and the modeling of material shaping processes. He is recipient of numerous awards and honors including Fellow of the Royal Society and Member of the American Academy of Engineering.

      Mike Ashby
         

    CES EduPack Course Presenter: Dr Claes Fredriksson

    Claes Fredriksson has more than 15 years’ experience teaching Materials-related subjects to undergraduate and post graduate students in Sweden, Canada, Belgium and the U.S.A, mainly in Mechanical Engineering. After gaining an MSc in Engineering Physics and PhD in Theoretical Physics he worked in both theoretical and experimental research on polymers, metals and biomaterials. He has a passion for teaching and won a grant as part of Sweden’s Excellence in Teaching Program to enable him to teach in the U.S.A. and facilitate the cross-pollination of pedagogical approaches.

      Claes Fredriksson
         

    CES EduPack Course Presenter: Hannah Melia

    Hannah Melia leads the Teaching Resources Team at Granta Design. She has a degree in Materials Science and Metallurgy from the University of Cambridge and 6 years of experience interacting with academics that use CES EduPack around the world.

      Hannah Melia
         

    CES Edupack Course Presenter: Dr Lee Phillips

    Dr. Lee Phillips is a former materials science researcher with an MSci and PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he also taught undergraduates and participated in science outreach projects. He has since undertaken postdoctoral research at the CNRS-Thales joint laboratory in France, where he studied multifunctional materials and devices. As Materials Consultant for Research and Education, Lee helps to lead projects in the Education Division and with external collaborators to enhance our teaching resources and databases, and also assists with internal, external and online training about the educational resources that Granta develops.

      Lee Phillips
         

    Sustainability Workshop Presenter: Dr Tatiana Vakhitova

    Dr Tatiana V Vakhitova contributes to teaching resources development in the area of Sustainable Development as well as supporting educational and research institutions in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Engineering from the Centre for Sustainable Development and an MPhil from the Land Economy Department (University of Cambridge, UK). Tatiana has teaching experience, working as a Teaching Assistant for Engineering Management Division at the University of Cambridge and being a supervisor for students at the Judge Business School, Engineering and Land Economy Departments (University of Cambridge).

      Tatiana Vakhitova
         

    eLearning Workshop Facilitator: Mark Endean

    Mark has taught materials engineering and manufacturing at the Open University since 1983. He was a member of the MATTER Steering Committee throughout the 1990s. He is currently developing a postgraduate module in manufacturing technology that will be delivered and presented entirely online.

      Mark Endean
         

    eLearning Workshop Facilitator: Andy Green

    Andy joined MATTER at the University of Liverpool in 1994 and managed the development and publication of Materials Science on CD-ROM in the ensuing years. He co-founded and developed aluMATTER and steeluniversity.org and more recently helped design and develop CORE-Materials, a repository of open educational resources for materials scientists and engineers. In 2004, he set up his consultancy business Materials e-Learning Technologies.

      Andy Green
         

    eLearning Workshop Facilitator: Prof Bill Clyne

    After completing his first degree and PhD in Cambridge, Bill held University posts in Brazil, Switzerland and Surrey, before returning to Cambridge and being appointed to a Chair in Mechanics of Materials. In the 1980s, he contributed to the Institute of Materials Engineering Materials Software Series and was a key member of the MATTER Steering Committee throughout the 1990s. He is Founder and Director of the DoITPoMS project.

      Bill Clyne
         

    eLearning Workshop Facilitator: Dr Alec Goodyear

    Alec has taught engineering at the Open University since 2001. He specialises in blended learning through online distance teaching and face-to-face residential schools. His current focus is on students' management of their learning towards professional and personal development planning needs.

      Alec Goodyear
         

    eLearning Workshop Facilitator: Dr Noel Rutter

    Noel has been based in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge since 2006. He is Director of Undergraduate Teaching in Materials Science and Director of Education for the School of Physical Sciences. The central focus of his education-specific academic role is to lead the development of materials science education in Cambridge. His experience in the elearning arena includes authorship of a number of widely used resources within DoITPoMS.

      Noel Rutter
         

    CES Selector Workshop Leader: Dr Charlie Bream

    Charlie is Senior Product Manager for CES Selector at Granta Design. After completing his PhD on recycling of thermoset composites at Brunel University, he spent 14 years in industry working on the development of lightweight materials and structures for British Aerospace (Space Systems), Pera International, and NXT before joining Granta in 2007.

      Charlie Bream