Student-Led Engineering Education with Autodesk Fusion at University College London

TOM PEACH: Hi there. Welcome along to my talk. My name is Tom Peach. I'm an associate professor at UCL in London, where I'm also the director of a building called MechSpace. And today, I'm going to be telling you a bit about how we teach CAD at UCL in my talk entitled, "Student-Led Engineering Education, Autodesk Fusion at University College London."

So this is just a brief overview of what we're going to be going through today. I'll start by introducing you to University College London, or UCL, as a university and the mechanical engineering course that we teach here. We'll then go through some of the tools that we use for teaching and assessing CAD. I'll take you through a case study, something called the IMechE Design Challenge, a competition that our students compete in.

Towards the end, we'll go on to some other student projects and successes so we can see in a little bit more detail how our students are actually using CAD in a more advanced way. And then I'll end with some reflections on how to effectively teach CAD to an undergraduate audience.

So let's get going with some background on UCL as an institution. We are a fairly old institution. We're just shy of our 200th birthday, so we're two years away from being 200. We're a very successful and large university, so we're consistently ranked top 10 in the world. And we're actually the largest university in the UK by student numbers.

We were the first English university to admit everyone and to give everyone that we admitted a degree. So we were the first to admit and grant degrees to women and the first to admit and grant degrees to religious minorities. Up until that point, the UK system was very much based on being a man and being a member of the Church of England.

We're a very successful University in terms of our pedigree. Our alumni include famous people such as Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer of DNA, an engineer close to my heart, Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone. We have also from the humanities and political science world, Mahatma Gandhi, the independence leader from India, and 30 other Nobel Prize winners that count UCL as their previous institution.

We've got a little picture there as well. This is what campus looks like. Right now, at the beginning of the academic year, we're inviting all our students onto campus. And this is our main building in the main quad. We are situated right in the heart of London. If you look at this beautiful spread of the center of London, we're down there in the bottom right side of the slide. That's our Bloomsbury campus, where you can see the UCL logo.

And we're sandwiched between two very large hospitals, University College Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Children's Hospital. So we're very well connected for biomedical research. That's my background. I'm a biomedical engineer by training. But we're also really in the heart of everything that is happening in Central London.

We've got the British Museum a few steps away. A little bit further, is somewhere like the BBC or the Royal Courts of Justice. Down towards the river, really not that far away, a 10-minute cycle ride, the Houses of Parliament. And then on the other side, we're really connected into the financial district as well.

And if you were to look kind of beyond this image, to the left, you would see our additional campus, which is UCL East, which is in the site of the 2012 London Olympics. So if you attended the Olympics in London a little over 10 years ago now, if you went back, you'd find the entire site has been transformed. And one of the new buildings is a UCL campus there, particularly with a focus on engineering.

This is the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where I call home. We like to claim that we were the first mechanical engineering department in the world. Our founding Head of Department, Alexander Kennedy, came up with this idea in 1847 of teaching engineering, not just by sitting people in a lecture theater or reading through a book, but actually doing the applications of the theory that we were learning. And learning, in particular, in a lab-based environment. And so that's why we like to claim that crown.

Now as a department, we've evolved quite a bit in the past 150 years plus. And we have some core research areas where we're focusing on in particular things like future energy, the biomechanics field, my personal field, automation and robotics, new materials, and also ship design is particularly strong for us. We've got a very large number of students.

As I said, UCL is the largest university in the UK. And in mechanical engineering, we're a large department too. So we've got about 750 undergraduate students studying with us at any one time. And if you include our master's students and our PhD students, we're topping out at about 1,000 students in mechanical engineering. Of those, more than 50 percent of our students are coming to study from abroad. So they're international students and they're visiting London for their studies.

You can see in that bottom image, the bottom right image, those are some of my students from a couple of years ago. They're looking very happy. That's our departmental dinner. And they've just finished their final assessment with us in their fourth year.

So like a lot of institutions in the UK, we run both three and four-year degrees. So we run a three-year BEng, that's a Bachelor of Engineering, or a four-year MEng, that's a master of engineering. And all of our students have the option to do what is really a minor in another engineering discipline. So they might be graduating with a particular focus on programming as well as a mechanical engineering degree.

We deliver our teaching in a really wide range of ways. As I said, we were founded from the idea of teaching in labs and more practically. But we teach in lecture theaters, like the image on the far right there. That's half a lecture theater. That's quite a large space. We also teach in smaller problem set tutorials in small groups. We do that teaching in labs, where our students get to apply the theory that they've learnt into a real-world context. And we also teach in a workshop setting, where our students get to design, and build, and create.

The curriculum that our students are studying is very broad, like a typical mechanical engineering course. This is set out by lots of regulatory bodies, but they have to study all the classics of mechanical engineering with us. Be that thermodynamics, and fluid and solid mechanics, control, programming, materials, manufacturing. But within that, so they're taking eight modules a year, probably about two of those modules, one in four modules in each year, is going to have some sort of a design focus. And for us, that's really where the practical teaching comes in, but it's also where the CAD comes in as well.

A really important space for us in the more practical side of our delivery of the course is a building called MechSpace. This is a building that I'm the director of. And this is a little off campus. We're just in Kings Cross. And the whole point of this building was to bring that practical teaching back into the core of our undergraduate degree.

It's a space that is equipped with breakout areas and teamwork spaces so our students can work on projects together. There's a computing cluster, where they can work either on CAD or programming together. And then we have multiple floors of teaching workshops, like the top image on the slide there. And those are set up with hand tools, electronics and a wide array of CNC facilities, and milling and turning, laser cutting, and with 3D printing as well.

This space is really good for our students to work on their academic projects, perhaps a final year dissertation project or an early year project sprint that they might be working on in a group. But it's also a space where our students can do personal projects or hobby projects. We really want to get them engaged with as much practical engineering as possible in their time with us.

It's also an excellent space for a lot of our activities that look outward from the department. So we're regularly having schools and communities come and visit us for outreach events. We run repair cafes in the building, so we get our students to teach members of the public how to fix their appliances.

We run summer schools for schoolchildren to come and learn a bit more about mechanical engineering and to learn about the STEM outreach events. It's also the number one stop for any visitor to our department. The eagle eyed amongst you might have spotted in the center of the bottom image, that is Dara Treseder, the Chief Marketing Officer of Autodesk, who came to visit us a couple of years ago.

So let's take a look at how we teach CAD in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, both how we used to teach it and how we teach it currently. Before we get into the details, I'd like to start in perhaps an unconventional place, if you'll humor me. We're going to start 2,500 years ago. This is Herodotus.

Perhaps, it's not obvious what role he would have in how we teach CAD today. But Herodotus is the Father of History. So his great task was that he wrote down all of Greek history at the time-- this was about 500 BC-- and a very long list of really battles, and wars, and conquests that stretched into nine volumes. This took him most of his life, but when it was complete, it was really the most comprehensive source of information about what at the time was considered human history.

So what can we learn from Herodotus today that's going to be relevant to how we teach our students? Well, there's three core things here. If you want to write down all of the information about a particular subject, it's going to take you most of your life, like Herodotus did. The second thing is, sadly, by the time you've done that, the information is immediately out of date. So if you're trying to write down the history of humanity, by the time you finish, things are going to have changed.

And then the final thing is that just because you have that resource, just because you have a great text, doesn't make it particularly easy to learn that information. In particular, if you don't know what you don't know, you're going to have to start at the beginning. And it might take you most of your life to try and read through all of that text as well. So those are three important things to consider as we now step our way through how we begin to teach CAD and other subjects at UCL.

Here's an example. So we are teaching our cohort of first-year mechanical engineers CAD. It's a large cohort, sort of 200, 250 students at a time. I would love to teach them individually. Like in the top right image there, I'm having a chat with one of our students, [? Sui ?] [? Yung ?] and looking at the design that she's working on on her screen. But the reality is I'm more likely to be teaching in an environment closer to the bottom image on the screen.

That's a giant room. You can probably see tables and chairs all the way to the horizon. That is a room big enough to have half of our students in it at once. So that's only half of the seats that I would be teaching CAD to on a typical day. Because of that, the size of those rooms, and but also students preference for how they like to work, that means we really need to be teaching students on their own laptops. And they need to install software on their laptops. We need to be able to teach them in a classroom space, but also they need to be able to take that home.

And actually, we need to be able to teach across a range of platforms. In particular, our students use both Windows machines and Apple machines. So we need something that works across both of those and something that works on campus and off campus.

We are introducing our students to CAD really early on in the course, maybe only three or four weeks in. They've only just started studying with us and then we introduced them to using this quite complex software. 90 to 95 percent of them have never even seen a piece of CAD software before. So this is all new, and it's happening in an environment where really everything they're learning is completely new to them. So it can be quite overwhelming for a first-year student to start learning CAD.

There are obviously a number of challenges there. I've touched on some of them already. And just to put them starkly on paper, some of the challenges that we face teaching and assessing CAD were really brought into focus in the platform that we used before Fusion. So about five years ago, we switched to Autodesk Fusion, but the platform we used before that, that was a slightly different one. Those of you who know your CAD platforms might be able to recognize it in the video on the right-hand side there.

But in those days, so more than five years ago, support for my students when they were learning CAD-- well, there were a few things that they could do. They could read the 300-plus page Product User Guide for the piece of software, a giant PDF. And not many of them did that, it won't surprise you to know.

We also ended up producing-- a colleague of mine, Tim Baker, commissioned these videos. What you see on the right there is a student-produced guide video, really a short course, taking you, as a viewer, through how to produce a single component, in this case, a bracket. So we produced those in house. Each set of videos took probably an entire summer for a student that we were paying to produce those to put together.

And then your other option was to ask someone else in the department, maybe a student from a higher year or a member of staff. That was really your only way to get support on CAD five or so years ago in our department.

When it came to assessing students' abilities with CAD, because we don't just teach, we also assess, the assessment was also quite arduous. In order to do this, I had to have a team of trained teaching assistants, 8 to 10 PhD students who we would train to be able to spot common mistakes in CAD. And it would take them as a team-- with a kind of automated process of using a spreadsheet that helped them mark our students work, it would take them a good 100 hours per assessment to actually go through, give those marks and give the feedback to the student as well. So a pretty serious task.

And then every time we changed assessment, so every time we updated what we wanted to actually assess our students on, because it's good practice to keep changing what you're actually getting them to do, every time we did that, we would have to rerecord those materials. We'd have to produce new guides. And really, that would take us a very long time. So here's an example of the sort of thing we would be getting a student to produce, a bracket, that we would give them a drawing and some of these guidance videos.

Now, a lot of this has now changed since we started using Fusion. So about five years ago, we switched over to Autodesk Fusion for a lot of reasons. In particular, the ability for all of our students, both Mac users and Windows users, to be able to run the software on their laptops. And actually, one of the key things that I found when beginning to teach Fusion was there was a really valuable database of online materials that Autodesk were already producing and sharing for free for anyone who wants to use them.

So those are the Autodesk Self-Paced Learning Resources. Those of you who haven't encountered them before, these are about 500 tutorials, modules, and courses that take you through step by step with a video guide how to produce a particular result in CAD. Be that how to use an individual tool or an entire course. So these are suitable really all the way through from right at the beginning of your CAD journey to being quite an advanced user.

There a really excellent resource for teaching. If you want to teach a specific topic, if I want to teach my students how to actually prepare a file for 3D milling, then something like this is an excellent way of doing that. They can take a few minutes, if you're just trying to learn a tool, or they could take multiple days if you're really going into depth. And I can easily integrate those into my teaching, and particularly in a pre-work format. So if I want my students to come to a project sprint with a known set of CAD skills, I can actually assign these self-paced learning tools beforehand so that they can complete them.

Here's an example of how some of our students have used their self-paced learning tools. So this is actually a second-year undergraduate example. What they're doing here is they are designing a bracket, a bracket to be able to take a maximum load with minimum mass. So really a classic engineering trade off. And the way they're doing that is to use a really powerful tool within Fusion, which is generative design.

We'll go into some of the details of how generative design works later, but what's important here is in order for these students to be able to complete the task, they can go ahead and in the self-paced environment, learn how to use the generative design module, understand the core theory, but also the applications. And from that, they can produce a series of possible design solutions, a bit like what you see in the second image on the slide there.

And then they can take those designs and prepare them for actual manufacturing, so machining, milling on a three-axis mill. And in order to be able to take their design from on the screen through to the actual toolpaths that the mill will run, they can then go back and look at the self-paced learning for three-axis milling and learn how to do that as well.

So for these more kind of advanced users-- these are second years. They've had a solid year of CAD experience. They can really go a long way using those self-paced learning materials. And that can happen at scale. I don't need to be showing every student multiple times how to do something. They can do this in their own time, at their own pace.

Here's my second slightly sideways look at teaching. This is something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I don't know if you've come across this before, but I think once I describe it, it'll be a very familiar experience to you. The Dunning-Kruger effect affects all of us, and it's the common experience of learning something new.

So let's take a quick look at this graph. Along the x-axis at the bottom there, we've got competence. So we start knowing nothing, on the far left. And we become a guru on the far right. And then on the vertical axis, we've got the confidence that we have, starting very low and then all the way up to high at the top there. So if we follow this green line, this is the classic human experience of learning something.

We start off knowing nothing and lacking in confidence, but we quickly learn a little bit and we shoot up that confidence curve. We think it's actually pretty easy. All the examples we're learning are quite simple. It's great. We can produce everything we're being asked to produce. But we haven't actually done a hell of a lot at this point, so our competence is quite low.

And then we reach this terrible point, the peak of Mount Stupid, where we are very confident, but we don't really know what we're doing. And we soon realize as we slip into the Valley of Despair, that actually, our confidence level drops because we're not as good as we thought we were, but we are actually getting a little bit better at the time. So our competence might be higher, but it doesn't feel like it. I think we've all experienced that.

And then you crucially move from the Valley of Despair up the Slope of Enlightenment. Now, what's happening here is we're getting slowly better each day, each hour, as we keep practicing something. So our competence is rising, and our confidence is rising, and they're rising steadily. And often in that Slope of Enlightenment, that's where we as a user, we know what we don't know.

So if we think back to that Herodotus example, in order to be on the Slope of Enlightenment, we need to be good enough to know what we're not good at and actually be able to address that with our learning. The Slope of Enlightenment, that's a really great area to be using those self-paced resources. If you know what you don't know and you know how to fix it, you can go into the library, you can search how to use a particular tool or a particular process, and you can increase your competence and confidence level.

The challenge really in all teaching is how do we deal with that left-hand side of the graph, particularly that first quarter. So how do I guide 200 of my students, on this journey, how do I guide them through the Peak of Mount Stupid, through the Valley of Despair, and actually make sure they don't lose heart completely and give up? How do you move your students through that space?

Now, one of the tools that I've been using to do that is a little piece of software called Fabrio. So this is a relationship that began a couple of years ago. Now we're into our third year using Fabrio as an institution. And Fabrio was a Autodesk academic partner two years ago that I started collaborating with.

Fabrio offer a range of mostly beginner and intermediate tutorials. They're self-paced. And you can see some examples of them on the right-hand side of the screen there as we scroll through. And be they kind of five minute examples or actually designing and producing an entire vehicle there. There's a dune buggy example.

So there's a series of tutorials. And these are then paired with a checker. And the checker is actually embedded into the Fusion install. You can see in the bottom image of this slide, next to the Inspect icon, there's this little Fabrio icon as well. So I can click that and actually open the checker. And I'll show you a video in the next slide of how that works.

But what the checker is doing is it allows me to submit my file at each step of a tutorial and get real-time feedback on whether I've done that operation correctly. So I can follow along the steps of the tutorial and I can check those steps each time. It's a bit like having a teacher right at your shoulder, no matter what pace you're moving through the tutorials. So it shows you whether you're right or wrong, and it tells you where you need to correct something.

So this is extremely valuable for my first-year students, those students who are over on the far left of the Dunning-Kruger curve. And actually, I want to get them, instead of going all the way up to Mount Stupid and all the way down to the Valley of Despair, this allows them to fail and correct themselves in lots of little bumps. So it's much better at building confidence because they're only ever making small mistakes and those small mistakes, they're instantly getting feedback on them, and then they can change what they're doing, correct their course, and then move on to the next step.

Here's an example. So here's a tutorial from Fabrio of how to make this particular hook. So within the web interface, you'll have step by steps of the tutorial. There's also an interactive window showing you the 3D render of what component you're actually modeling. Here's an example where we've created the component and now we're going to check it. And you can see that actually there's an issue with our component. That sweep is not correct. And that's been flagged up.

So we can take a look at the area that we should have. That's what's highlighted in blue. That's where our error has occurred. And then we can go in and actually make a correction. You can alter that feature. Go back to check the model, submit our new model, and well done, we've got it correct. So now we could move on to the next step of the tutorial.

That's the student-facing part of Fabrio. Really powerful tutorials with the plugin that lets me check each step of the way and see how I'm doing. On the back end, as a teacher, there's also a portal where I can see an awful lot of really useful information. In particular, I can see how each of my students is performing.

So in this example here on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see I can bring up an individual student. I can see their progress through particular courses. But I can also see, at the bottom of the screen, the files they've been submitting. So I can see the mistakes they're making, but also the things they're getting right. That's really valuable when I have a follow-up conversation with a student. If they say they don't understand something, I can actually go back and see the work they've been doing.

The other thing is, you've seen those existing tutorials, I can actually get Fabrio to put my UCL course material and assessments within the same platform. So I can begin to use my existing assessments within Fabrio, and I can get my students to submit their assessments through the platform where it will tell them whether they're right or wrong. And can use that to mark.

When we get students to do that in an assessment context, you can actually switch that Fabrio checker into an assessment mode. What happens then is you submit your file and instead of getting that instant feedback, telling you what's right or what's wrong, that feedback is delayed until the end of the assessment. So you don't know whether you're right or wrong, but the geometry has basically been marked. So I can see on the back end whether the student was right or wrong, and I can use that to construct their mark. So that's a way that I can instantly mark my students progress across all 200-plus students at whatever pace they're going at.

There are actually two ways that I can use Fabrio to assess. The first is just like that. So each step is pass/fail and the feedback is delayed, so a student won't actually know whether they're right or wrong until they complete the assessment. The other way is to enable that feedback so they're still getting the feedback of where they're right or wrong as they check their steps, but I can then get the system to count how many attempts it takes them to get a particular step right.

And that's really powerful early on because students know what they're doing right, they know what they're doing wrong. And actually, I want to know how fast they're learning. So counting those attempts is a really powerful way of doing that.

What impact has this had then on me as an educator, but also on my students who I'm teaching? Well, the first thing is my students' confidence with CAD has improved dramatically. If we look back over those five years, so really since we switched over to Fusion, the ability for my students to go and access self-paced learning is incredible. They are actually doing CAD in their own time. They enjoy it that much.

And that's partly because I think their confidence has never really been shaken. We've been giving them little steps and they've been getting progressively better. And in particular, that's where Fabrio has really helped, by giving a little bit of feedback on each step. So there's never any big failures. They're learning in little steps.

For me, marking is now so much faster than it used to be. I've said 10 times faster there, but it's close to instant. Really now, the time it takes me to mark is the administration around the marking, rather than the actual act of marking. Because that's all happening on the back end of the Fabrio software, where I know for each student, whether they've got something right or wrong, but also how many attempts it took them on that particular step.

That's great for me, but it's also great for my department. I'm now meeting every single marking deadline instantly. So I have 100 percent compliance in returning all my marks and all my feedback back to my students, despite the fact I have 200-plus students to actually be returning marks to.

The actual assessments and the marks in the assessments is very interesting as well. So there are two graphs up on the slide. The top one shows you the sort of mark distribution I was getting historically on a CAD assessment. So this would have been prior to five years ago. And you can see a lot of students there are getting very high marks and a very small number, from one to 10, are getting very low marks. The ones getting very low marks are probably not even attempting the assessment.

But it's quite hard to distinguish who's a really good student from just average student because pretty much everyone is getting pretty much everything right. If I compare that to the same assessment, but now running it through the Fabrio system, we're still getting a good number of students doing very, very well, above 80 percent. Clearly, a good number of my students are very good at CAD. And once they get going, they really learn fast. So we're still getting those higher marks. And I'm getting a much more even spread through the percentages.

And what really reassures me here is I've got a very strong average in the middle. And that's what I'd expect from my students, really. There's a large number of them. There's a wide range of abilities. I would expect to see a good, solid, average mark from most people and then some really excellent students in the upper end. And being able to distinguish an excellent student from an average student is a very important task for an assessment.

The other thing to notice here is I've got that kind of long tail down in the lower end of marks. And that doesn't concern me because these are small assessments at the beginning of the learning journey. And what it does show me is there are still some students who need additional support. And I can target those students then with additional exercises. And I can actually go into the Fabrio platform and see how they've been progressing.

Did they start off very badly, But then something-- something really clicked and they got a lot better? Or are they struggling with something else within the platform. So my assessments now are actually much better at distinguishing really good students, from average students, from students who are struggling.

Let's take a look at the impact this has then had on my students as they move through the degree program, and in particular, how they start to use CAD for more and more tasks within the course. And I'm going to take you through a case study of something called the IMechE Design Challenge. So the IMeche is the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and they regulate degrees in the UK in mechanical engineering. And each year, they produce this design challenge for students to compete in.

So the design challenge is students have to design from scratch a vehicle to perform a particular task. The one in the video here that you'll see very enthusiastically stops on that target. That's more enthusiasm than I've ever seen in a lecture theater. This is one of the great things about teaching practically. So this example, the vehicle has to drive up to a wall and then return to the exact point that it stopped-- that it started at.

But this challenge changes every year. And what we do here is we take that design brief and we give our students two week-long project sprints. The first one, they design their solution, and the second one, they prototype and test their solution. And we're doing all of that in our teaching workshop, that you can see in the video here.

Students are using CAD to virtually prototype their designs, really from day one of that first project sprint. So they're producing something within Fusion that then they can begin to iterate and improve. We are giving them guidance and we're giving them design reviews, but actually, they are responsible for learning the CAD themselves, self-paced.

The CAD that they produce will get compared to the physical prototype that they manufacture. And in the competition, they will score more points the closer they are. So it's really in their interest to build as accurate, and useful, and functional CAD models as possible. And the local winners of this competition, So the group here that you can see are doing exceptionally well, they will go on to represent the university at a London final, and then, if they're successful, to a national final as well.

Let's have a look at some of the things our students have been producing. This is a first-year example. So in this year that we're looking at, the task was to design a vehicle that could climb the inside of a pipe, lift a chain, so an increasing weight. And that all had to be done within a very limited budget and a limited power requirement.

These are students who this is probably their first time that they are properly designing from scratch, and building, and competing. It's quite daunting for them. And in also, in most cases, they've only been doing CAD for a matter of weeks. So they've got to go from having perhaps opened up Fusion for the first time, four, six weeks ago, to producing a design like you can see on the screen here-- so this is a piece of first-year CAD-- all the way down to the details of even modeling where the wires are going to be routed through the system.

We give them feedback as we go. So mostly on their design decisions, rather than helping them with learning individual parts of CAD. They are learning self-paced how to do this sort of thing with the Fabrio tutorials and also with the Autodesk self-paced learning.

What's really great about that is students who are motivated, and enthusiastic, and ambitious about what they want to do, they can really stretch themselves. So they produce a functioning design like this, but then they think about how they can actually optimize it. And we've even had first year students moving into topological optimization and generative design to actually minimize the mass of their vehicle when they're only a few weeks into learning CAD.

Here's a second-year example. So these are students who have had about a year's worth of CAD teaching to date. So they can do a lot more, but also, they've learnt a lot more along the way. So this challenge is a bit more complicated. Now they're starting to use microcontrollers. And actually, this robot has to climb also with a chain, but it has to stop at colored markers on this pipe and it has to stop at those markers in a specified order. So quite a complicated design brief, again being built in one or two weeks.

These students are now really taking their CAD training and running with it. So not only are they producing beautiful renders, like what you can see on the side of the screen there, but they're using the FEA tools built into Fusion. So they're starting to analyze their structure. If they are producing components on CNC machines, they're actually plotting out their toolpaths.

And in many cases, they're beginning to use generative design almost as standard. And to optimize the mass that they're placing into their devices, something like this that climbs, you really want to minimize the mass at all costs. And all of that is self-paced. That's all students teaching themselves through those online platforms.

What's the result of this then? Well, the pictures kind tell you the story instantly. There's a lot of silverware on display there. And the reason that can happen is looking back at the statistics of how our teams have been performing, if I compare how my undergraduate teams perform now to five years ago, I've got three times as many of those groups scoring more than 80 percent in the competition in terms of points.

What does that mean? If you're scoring above 80 percent you're likely to be going to a regional and then a national final. So you stand a chance of winning. And we've got three times as many students who now stand a chance of winning. A lot of that is because of the quality of their CAD. They are virtually prototyping from day one.

That has translated into UCL teams actually winning this prize, the National Championship, for three consecutive years. So the past three years, we've won this prize. We have never won the prize up until then. And now we've won it three years in a row, and we're going in for a fourth competition this year.

If you look at those smiling students on the left of the-- on the right of the screen, sorry, I think just over half of those, or nine of those students, are now in placements or in employment in Formula One teams, in engineering roles. So you can see that these students are really the pinnacle of what we're producing on the course. They are producing stuff that is getting them noticed by very competitive employers.

These students as well have also led a lot of our best projects, be they curricular projects, something they're being actually assessed on, but also extracurricular projects that we run an awful lot of at UCL. I'm going to take you through a few student projects now, and in particular, I want you to focus on the bottom right image on the right-hand side, the young lady holding the cup. That is Carla, and we're going to look at one of Carla's projects next.

So this was Carla's final year project. It was to optimize the design of some race car uprights. So a race car upright is a component that sits between the axle, and the brake, and the wheel of a car, and the suspension system. And you can see on the left-hand side there, there are kind of fixed points where the upright has to contact either the axle, or the brakes, or the suspension.

And the task that Carla was set, it was a pretty challenging one, it was to redesign these uprights, to minimize their mass, without compromising their stiffness or their strength. And actually, ideally, to increase their stiffness and their strength. So really do much more with much less.

The way she did this was to use generative design in Fusion. So building on that long heritage of the self-paced learning and a series of design sprints in her first and second year, and then in her third year, actually rain for an entire year on this project and using generative design to produce something like 50 different design concepts of how you might solve this problem.

She then built a number of numerical analysis tools to choose the best concepts. And this is the final one that she came up with. That is a additively manufactured piece of titanium. That's the render. But we have the actual produced titanium parts sitting on the car in our workshop.

And in this case, she really exceeded her goals. So she optimized that design and the mass was decreased by 39 percent, and the stiffness was actually increased by 38 percent. So really driving down the mass and really pushing up the stiffness. And all of that was possible from that really quite advanced CAD skill of using generative design and then actually using that to optimize the design further and further with a series of numerical analysis loops.

This work is really impressive and actually won Carla an Educational Excellence Award at Autodesk University last year. So some of you might recognize her.

This is an assessed project, a final year undergraduate project. We also have a lot of our students working on extracurricular projects and really using their CAD in quite advanced ways. So this is UCL Racing, or UCLR colloquially. This is a group of about 150 students who work across a series of projects where they design, build, and compete with the vehicles that they are creating.

We have six different teams. You can see them across the bottoms of the slide. So the first, on the far left, that's our Formula student team. That's a single-seater racing car that our students design, build, and then race around Silverstone. The second image in, in front of the main UCL campus, that is the Ecomarathon car. So that's a super-high efficiency vehicle. It runs on a hydrogen fuel cell and does the equivalent of something like 5,000 miles to the gallon.

The third image, the third team, that's the Mars Rover team. So they are building a Rover that can navigate a simulated Martian surface and take samples. We also have the Unpiloted Autonomous System team. And they're building drones, helicopters, fixed wing planes. And in this case, the example you can see there is a vertical takeoff and landing drone.

We have a Human-Powered Submarine team. They're building a submarine that you pedal to actually move through the water. And then finally, on the right-hand side, we have our rocket team, who build rockets that aren't quite into space, but they have ambitions to be the first student team in space.

As I said, there's 150 students working on this. In many cases, there are first and second years in these teams who only a matter of months ago were picking up CAD for the first time. And now they might be designing a component that goes into a winning car or goes up to 10,000 feet in a rocket.

Here are some of the impressive things that our students have been doing. So on the bottom there, you've got the Formula student car doing some practice loops before its race at Silverstone. Everything you see there is student designed and built.

On the left-hand side here, we have a video that our Ecomarathon team put together, showing the design process starting in Fusion of optimizing their bracket for their motor mount. So keeping that mass down, maximizing stiffness again. And that will sit in the back of the car, which is being powered by the hydrogen fuel cell.