Royal Academy of Engineering "Engineering in a pandemic" - practical activities and resources for primary and secondary STEM teachers RE219 / D13

Tunde Orelaja, the RAEng London Teacher Coordinator will introduce the current resource: "Engineering in a pandemic", a series of creative and collaborative challenges in which students are encouraged to find imaginative approaches to problem solving and understanding the role STEM skills play in real world engineering scenarios.  All teachers who attend will be able to register for free class sets of the resources for their schools.

The engineering community plays a vital role in our daily lives and engineers have been essential in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.  While the pandemic has had devasting global effects, the engineering community worked together to quickly respond to the sudden demands of coronavirus, even finding opportunities for positive change.  Engineers have created emergency ventilators, diagnostic tests and manufacturing methods, helped increase hospital capacity, ensure that vulnerable people can safely get supplies and helped us all stay in touch with family and friends while social distancing.Challenges in this STEM resource include:

• getting creative moulding viruses
• exploring what happens in an outbreak
• investigating lateral flow tests
• designing and developing social distancing tools
• testing and trialling different types of surgical masks
• investigating the tech that has helped us manage the pandemic.