Manufacturing Zone at the 2015 Cambridge Science Festival

We had a great day yesterday at the Manufacturing Zone at the Institute for Manufacturing organised as part of the 2015 Cambridge Science Festival. Many thanks to all those who attended and all those who helped deliver such a great range of activities.

For those who’d like to explore some of the issues presented in the talk on ‘How engineers make the world a better place‘, here are links to some of the videos and projects we mentioned:

• If you’d like to know more about Cambridge University Eco Racing (the team that Keno described who built the solar-powered racing car to travel 3,000km across Australia), click here.
• Robohand – making a low-cost 3D-printed artificial functioning hand for children. This project has since inspired others such as the fantastic Project Daniel, delivering both new hands and arms for child amputees in South Sudan, but also training local teachers to make these new limbs.  You can also watch Iron Man himself deliver a new hand to one lucky child.
• Basics of 3D printing – this video from Ultimaker provides a nice clear illustration of how the consumer 3D printer works. And this video gives a summary of the main opportunities and challenges of 3D printing.  The latest new technology that delivers a kind of rapid 3D printing is Carbon3D and a video of their extraordinary “Terminator 2-ish” technology can be seen here.
• The wonderful Dovetailed company’s video on 3D printed food can be accessed here.
• Crossrail is the truly jaw-dropping project to build a new East-West underground line for London.  There are lots of resources relating to this project here.
• To learn more about how jet engines are built, Rolls-Royce has some videos on their main video website.
• James Dyson set up a foundation to help young people and teachers learn about industrial design, and there are a whole bunch of really useful resources available for download.
• The time-lapse video of a 15-storey hotel being built in 48 hours can be found here.
• And the excellent ‘Building an Airbus A380 in 7 minutes’ is here.

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