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Asked by ava_07 to Ellen, Ted, S. S., Laura, Kevin, Andrea on 6 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by Caoimherainbow.
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Ellen Simmons answered on 6 Mar 2019:
That’s a tough one! I think most of my “solutions” were actually related to people. Everyone things engineering is about the machines, materials, tools etc. But actually, the team is the key to making the product work. So figuring out how to make the team work in the way required is the first step – then you can worry about the technical side!
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Andrea Pacheco answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Planning ahead is important, but also to be prepared to not success in the first attempt. And the more experts involved in the solution the better, we all have unique valuable skills to contribute.
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Laura Farina answered on 7 Mar 2019:
I love to adopt easy solution, also sometimes daily life object can be really useful. For example you can use a Pringles box to make an antenna!
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Kevin OBrien answered on 11 Mar 2019:
It’s not an invention, but it was an interesting solution. We had a systems that measured current on one of our power controller integtated circuits that needed to adapt to changes in temperature.
It wasn’t working as well as expected, so I had to come up with an equation to select the associated components to optimise the response across the expected temperature range, minimising the error in the measurement.
It doesn’t sound terribly interesting, but it was a nice challenging problem that in the end had a simple and elegant solution. -
Ted Burke answered on 11 Mar 2019:
I really liked Ellen’s answer to this question. With that in mind, I think some of the best things I’ve come up with in work are competitions that my students compete in as part of my classes. They have to be designed carefully so that you need to learn specific things to do well in the competition, but the experience for the students is quite motivating and you remember something best when you put it into practice rather than just learning it on paper. An example of a competition I use in class is a robot sumo competition that we run at the end of each term. Teams of first-year engineers build robots to compete in the tournament – they learn so much technical knowledge by doing it (programming, electronics, mechanical design) but they also really enjoy it and it gives them practice at working in an engineering team. I’ve tried to devise similar competitions for a few of my other subjects because it works so well.
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