Photo: Alan Place
LEGO, the popular children’s toy, is turning fun into a career option by helping young people develop their engineering talents.
The ECubers summer camps for 13 to 15 year-olds show secondary school students what it is like to work in a manufacturing environment as well as developing their creative and technical skills.
The first camp, ‘Build and Programme’, at the University of Limerick (UL) saw students use LEGO Technic Sets for building and LEGO MINDSTORMS for programming.
The follow-on camp, ECubers Inventor, takes place this week and will see students build a machine that receives balls from one module and passes them to another using LEGO Technic Sets.
Mentors on the programme include experienced industrial experts, UL Mechatronics students as well as Transition Year students.
The ECubers programme is run by the ESE Academy, an industry-led, not-for-profit initiative to advance the delivery of Equipment Systems Engineering (ESE) education.
Established by Irish software engineering company, SL Controls, in conjunction with UL, the aim of the ESE Academy is to educate students to the level required for Industry 4.0 as well as encourage young people to study and pursue careers in engineering.
Industry 4.0 is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things and cloud computing.
One of the ways the academy is educating young people is by supporting the new Master of Engineering in Mechatronics at UL and the second is the roll out of ECubers in schools across the country.
SL Controls co-founder Shane Loughlin says that very little has been done to explain to young people, especially young girls, how much engineering has evolved over the last 20 years.
“We want to get young people excited about, and interested in, engineering and what could be a more fun way to do that than by using LEGO to help them relate to engineering.
Mr Loughlin said that to be ready to capitalise on Industry 4.0, Ireland needed engineers who are not just trained in one discipline, but ones who are interdisciplinary or even antidisciplinary.
“We need people who say: ‘how do we fix the problem’. If you take the example of the operating theatre: everyone is totally focussed on working together to save the patient and they don’t say ‘that’s not part of my job’. That’s what we need for Industry 4.0 as it is all about keeping systems functioning and that needs people with a range of different skill sets,” he explained.
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