Design Excursion to UQ

On Wednesday during Activities Week, Year 9 Design and IT students visited the University of Queensland St. Lucia campus in Brisbane. During the day we participated in various workshops that helped us to understand and express our creative thinking.

We worked with a group called Engineers Without Borders who work with communities in developing countries. They use design thinking and their engineering skills, to identify and solve real life problems in these communities. The workshop we completed with Engineers Without Borders was based around biomedical engineering. It involved creating a prosthetic leg with the materials they gave us. We then had to attach this limb to a group member and try to walk two to four metres. This task turned out to be much more of a challenge than we initially thought. Another workshop involved cracking the codes of small colour sensor robots, Ozobots. The Ozobots changed their behaviours depending on the colour they detected with their sensors. For example, if the robot sensed green and red together it would do a 360-degree turn. The final workshop that we visited was about Chemical Engineering. We were challenged to make the ‘Perfect Cocktail’. We mixed ice and water to create a mixture that had a volume of 550ml and had a temperature of -5 degrees Celsius. That’s below freezing point! For each degree and ml our Perfect Cocktail was out, our teams were deducted points. To conclude our visit at UQ we were given a tour of the campus and learnt about the life of a university student. The student ambassadors who were our tour guides for the day were really helpful – plus they gave us goodie bags before we left! Thanks, UQ.