Oliver Broadbent, Author at Expedition Workshed

Sneak peek at our latest structural game

Earlier this year we announced the launch of our structural games initiative in which we will create a suite of new apps for learning about structural engineering. Today we issued our first concept development report to our funders, and can

Funding agreed for Bare Essentials of Bridge Mechanics

Following the launch earlier this year of the Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics we are pleased to say that we have agreed funding to start producing the second set in the series, the Bare Essentials of Bridge Mechanics. The expertise

Kick-off – the next generation of structural games

We are excited to announce that Think Up is beginning work on a new generation of structural games, that takes everything we have learnt from creating games like Catastrophe and tools like Push Me Pull Me and making them even better.

Fantastic biographies of engineers

I have just been reading through the fantastic set of biographies of engineers that the Engineering Timelines team have been putting together. For each engineer readers can access essays about their life, their achievements, their influences, who they influenced, and,

Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics – now online

We are excited to announce a major new addition to Expedition Workshed – the Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics series (jump straight to the introductory video). In this set of videos Professor John Burland, of Imperial College London, draws on his

Ed’s pick of the week – Drawings of the Bayonne Bridge

My pick of the week this week is an online version of a book by the Port Authority of New York used to tell the story of the Bayonne Bridge, over the Kill van Kull between Port Richmond, Staten Island, New

Updating the Velodrome

One of the founding principles of Workshed is to take some of the vast amount of technical documents, images and models that exist in the drawers and hard-drives of engineering consultancies, and make them available for students to work with.

The Bare Essentials of Soil Mechanics

This month we begin filming ‘The Bare Essentials’, a set of videos starring leading engineers explaining core concepts that engineering students need to know. The Bare Essentials will begin with a series on soil mechanics, given by John Burland, the

Faster server

Hold on to your seats: we’re now hosting Workshed on a much faster server, which means you should be enjoying much better download times. Let us know what you think.

THE NEW VERSION OF WORKSHED GOES LIVE 18TH SEPTEMBER – BE THE FIRST TO TEST IT!

The fantastic new version of Workshed goes live 18th September – but you can be the first to test it at our Developers’ Conference on 17th September. Expedition Workshed has been completely redesigned to make it easier to use wherever you are.

Sign up now the Expedition Workshed Developers’ Conference 2013 – 17th September

We are pleased to announce that places are now available for the 2013 Workshed Developer’s Conference. At this year’s conference we will be unveiling the new HTML version of Expedition Workshed. This is our chance once again to say a big

Workshed fund-raising update

It has now been five months since we launched our fund-raising drive, and we are absolutely delighted with the response. So far, we have received contributions from the following universities: Bath Imperial UCL University of East Anglia Strathclyde Limerick Edinburgh

Multi-constraint Analysis in Action

Today I was helping out in a design lecture at Edinburgh University in which lecturer Tim Stratford led a simple but effective demonstration of multi-constraint analysis (MCA). This is one of the basic tools that I have been referring to

Manchester Embedding Sustainability Workshop

Today Think Up ran its fourth Embedding Sustainability workshop, this time at the University of Manchester. Delegates came from Warwick, Liverpool John Moores, Loughborough, Salford, Manchester Metropolitan and the University of Manchester. We were also joined by a member of

Embedding Sustainability Workshop – Edinburgh

This morning Think Up held the second of its Embedding Sustainability workshops, this time at the University of Edinburgh. Today’s delegates were from the Universities of Abertay, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Herriot Watt and Strathclyde. Rather than focusing on the challenges

Embedding Sustainability Seminar – Bristol

Yesterday we held the first of six seminars on embedding sustainability in the undergraduate civil engineering curriculum. The session at Bristol University, was attended by staff from the University of Wales, Newport, University of Portsmouth, University of West of England

Launching the 2013 Expedition Workshed fund-raising campaign

When we launched Workshed in 2010, we used the Expedition Engineering website as template. This helped us get moving and achieve impact and demonstrate the concept quickly. Now that the concept has been demonstrated, we need to address the many

Beta testing of the new Push Me Pull Me begins – join the gang

We are nearly there folks! Today we have invited our generous community of users to help us test the latest version of PMPM before we launch it on the Workshed Site. If all goes well we are optimistic we shall have

Workshed now back online

Workshed is now back online. We know it is frustrating that site has been down so thank you for your patience while we’ve been away. Do let us know if this has impacted you in any way.

Workshed offline

We have had to take Workshed offline temporarily. This is because a sister site on the same server was hacked and was infecting users with malware. We hope the site will be back on line over the weekend. We sincerely

Talking structures with sculpture students at the University of Brighton.

Today I gave a talk called a ‘World Tour of Structural Form’ at the sculpture department at the University of Brighton. I was invited by Tom Grimsey who had seen me give a similar talk in Brighton at Cafe Scientifique.

Beginning the re-design of Workshed…

In the two years since Workshed has been online we have had lots of really positive feedback. The persistent criticism that we are faced with is the fact that the website is Flash-based. The site was originally created using the

Workshed big in Texas

We see from our analytics that a whole bunch of people logged on to Workshed in the city of Austin Texas. That would be our friends at the University of Texas at Austin would it? In other news, we are

Workshed operating strategy now available for download

We have made our operating startegy for the year available for download. If you are interested, then take a look here. This and other useful documents about Workshed are also available from the ‘Spreading the Word about Workshed’ page on

Embedding Sustainability – Workshops for Teaching Staff

In March 2012, Think Up published a report titled ‘Embedding Sustainability in the Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum’. The report is available through the Staffroom area of the Workshed site. Since then we have been commissioned by the Royal Academy of

International turnout for first ever Workshed Developer Conference

A big thank you to everyone who attended our inaugural Expedition Workshed Developer Conference last Friday. It was a chance for twenty of our most enthusiastic supporters from universities around the country to meet each other and to tell us

Institution of Structural Engineers Academic Conference

We’ll be down at the Institution of Structural Engineers Academic Conference today to talk to university staff about how we can collaborate to develop more resources for Workshed. And of course tomorrow we have our own Developer Conference. And if

News from the University of West of England

At the annual Constructionarium luncheon last week I had the pleasure of John Savage from the University of West of England who was telling me about how Workshed is being used to support structural engineering teaching at UWE. We had

More gherkin bashing on a giant screen

Catastrophe on a giant screen! Again…After the success of last week’s event at UCL, this time Catastrophe is travelling South of the river. You’ll get another chance to have a go at deconstructing the Eiffel Tower or the Gherkin at A

Now live – Catastrophe, with sound effects

One of Workshed’s most popular learning tools has now been given a boost with the inclusion of sound effects. Try for yourself by clicking here. I don’t know about you, but the introduction of sound makes me a lot

Catastrophe with 24 bit sound – showing at UCL on Wednesday 12th September

This week we’re taking one of Workshed’s most popular features to a whole new level. At the Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering Open Day, September 12th, some of UCL’s best research will be showcased, including a rather epic take on

Helping you spread the word about Workshed

I often find myself composing a quick email to let someone know about Workshed. I am sure other Workshed enthusiasts find themselves doing the same, so I have created a page that has text which I use in emails about

Announcing the Expedition Workshed Developer’s Conference – 21st September 2012

We are pleased to announce that places are now available for the first Expedition Workshed developer conference. This is our chance to say a big thank you to all the people who have been involved in the development of Workshed.

Catastrophe in use – supporting students at the Energy Engineering Summer School

This just in from Lawrence Coates at University of East Anglia. Thanks Lawrence for sharing news of Workshed in use. “As part of the first Energy Engineering Summer School at UEA 21 year 12 pupils from schools around the UK

Catastrophe game – temporary outage

During the summer, when student usage of Workshed is typically low, we will occasionally be carrying out some maintenance to the site. At present, Catastrophe is temporally unavailable as we transfer Workshed to a more secure hosting service. Catastrophe will

Bridge Builder Games Added to Workshed

We’ve just added a selection of bridge builder games to Workshed. They all require you to design increasingly complex bridges with fewer and fewer resources. The games are posted in the Models/Games section of the Workshed site, along with our

A few notes for the Workshed technical team on how to track comments

This post is for Gennaro and Diana, and anyone else who is interested in tracking technical queries related to Workshed. One of the reasons for setting up this blog was to make it easier for developers to and users to

How do I make the video button go away on the videos on Workshed

I’ve had a few emails from people asking me how to make the play or pause sign go away when they are watching video on the Workshed site (the image above shows the play sign that you want to disappear

News in from the University of Kent, Canterbury

On a snowy morning in January I took the train down to the University of Kent, Canterbury to help out in Ben Godber’s Structure and Form at the Architecture School. Following previous discussions about how Workshed could be used to

Practical Guidance on Teaching Sustainability Now Available on Workshed

Now available for download from the Workshed website, a new report full of practical suggestions for how sustainability can be enhanced in civil engineering teaching. Think Up produced the report, with funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the

Back online – again

It looks like we have resolved our problems with Workshed access over the weekend. We are taking steps to make the site more robust, and we will give more information once we have taken these steps. Please do let us

Workshed offline until later this morning

Hello again, I regret to inform users that the Workshed site will remain off line until later this morning. The bug problems that we had with site have now been fixed, and our hosting company is reinstating the site as

Back on line

We are back on line. Apologies for the temporary outage. Please do let us know if we have inconvenienced you. Oliver

Workshed temporarily off line

We regret that we are currently experiencing a technical hitch with the Workshed website which has caused us to take the site off line. We hope to be back on line as soon as possible, and we will post any

Who Uses Workshed? – Analytics to March 2012

We now have two months of analytics data for Workshed. The headline figures are 4716 visits by 2742 unique visitors, which shows that 42% of people using the site are returning visitors. The average time spent on the site is 5:25

Help for creating new content

We are working with more and more people to create content for Workshed. I am going to start uploading tools to this blog to make the collaboration process easier. As a starting point I have created a proforma to help gather

Workshed: Big in Canada

January’s update to the Workshed site gave us access to Google Analytics data for the first time. Two weeks’ data make for fascinating reading. The Pont de Quebec is the world’s longest single span cantilever bridge In the two weeks since

Catastrophe drawing competition for architecture students at the University of Kent

If you are one of the students studying architecture at the University of Kent who took part in the Workshed seminar then this competition is for you. We want to see what kind of structures you can produce using the

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it

Antarctic Design Workshop Now Available on Workshed

I have just uploaded the first in a new series of design workshops that we are making available on Workshed. The Antarctic Research Station project is based on the real design competition held in 2004 to design a replacement for

Push Me Pull Me Worksheets now available on Workshed

We have just uploaded a set of Push Me Pull Me worksheets to Expedition Workshed. The Worksheets are located in Staffroom/Undergraduate. Link to the new resources. The worksheets, written by Stelios Yiatros, and in collaboration with Lawrences Coates and Iain MacCleod, lead students through

Talking to the ICE about using Workshed in schools

This is evening I am giving a presentation at a meeting at the Institution of Civil Engineers about resources that engineering ambassadors can use when running activities at schools to inspire school children about engineering. We recognised about a year ago

Update – Push Me Pull Me Worksheets

These are on their way soon… As the worksheets are image-rich, we have experienced a few glitches getting them compressed to a size suitable for download online. We hope to have these published to the Undergraduate Staffroom by 25th November.

Talking Workshed at Brighton University

I am delighted to have been given the chance to go to Brighton University at the beginning of December. I have been invited to give a lecture to 80 first year students who are studying basic structural engineering. Whilst these students have already

How Workshed is being used at Coventry University

(photo from the Red Window at Coventry Catherdral) Dr Neil Tsang is a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Building at Coventry University, and uses Workshed as part of his teaching. He very kindly

Bath time

I scooted up to the University of Bath this afternoon to update Tim Ibell and Antony Darby on the latest developments of Workshed. We mostly talked about how to use the new physics engine to create a new suite of

Workshed at the IABSE Symposium

Gennaro and I presented Expedition Workshed at the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE) Symposium yesterday as part of poster session. The poster summarised a paper by Gennaro, Ed and Angela titled: ‘Expedition Workshed: Engineering education for the 21st

Now online – a preview of Workshed’s new physics engine

Over the summer, Gennaro and his team of programmers have been developing a more advanced physics engine to power the online structural teaching tools on Workshed. The latest incarnation is now available online for you to take a look. It comes with a health

An update on the current and planned functionality of ‘Catastrophe’

Image credit ‘Jimmer Slimmer’ We are in various conversations (see here) with the users of Workshed about how the ‘Catastrophe’ platform can be used to teach specific structural engineering concepts. Genarro and his team are in the process of rewriting the real-time solver

Teaching Structural Stability to Architects

During our conversation we spent time looking at how the Catastrophe game can be used to set up examples of different types of structural form for architects to explore. As part of the updates to Workshed for the new academic year, we intended to

Push-Me-Pull-Me tutorial sheets – project update

Earlier this month, Stylios Yiatros at Brunel University sent us the completed set of tutorials and teaching resources on which he has been leading the development. We are now developing a new format for the tutorial sheets so that they can be presented in

Stunning new concrete videos now live on Workshed

The new suite videos resources about the behaviour of concrete is now live on the Expedition Workshed site. Follow this link to access the videos on the Workshed site. We produced this set of videos with funding from CONSTRUCT and in collaboration with Imperial College

What to do if the Push Me Pull Me apps don’t load

One of the difficulties we have faced in developing the Push Me Pull Me apps is making them universally accessible on all platforms. The biggest problem is that the apps won’t display unless the browser window is set to 100% zoom.

New concrete videos coming soon

Think Up is in the final stages of editing eight new videos for the concrete section of Stuff Failure. These videos were funded by CONSTRUCT and were shot at Imperial College Civil and Environmental Engineering materials testing laboratory. This exciting addition to

A new blog for our first birthday

Expedition Workshed will soon be one year old. This summer we are preparing the website for its second year in service. From the very start Expedition Workshed has been a collaboration between people who share a keen interest in improving

Text book results and making concrete cry – day two on location

Yesterday we were compressing things; today we have been pulling things apart. With most of the compression tests completed yesterday, we spent this morning shooting footage of tensile tests of reinforcing steel. Talk about textbook behaviour! The graphs output from

Shooting concrete – day one on location

I always find shooting video nerve-racking. There is always a limited window of opportunity to get the shot right. At least when shooting videos of materials exploding, there are no worries about forgetting lines. But in the case of creating

Funding from University of Bath for development of Push-Me-Pull-Me

We are delighted that the University of Bath has made funding available to support the further development of Push-Me-Pull-Me. Gennaro Senatore and his team of programmers have set themselves the challenge of updating the real-time solver, originally developed to power the

List of concrete tests finalised

We have now finalized the list of concrete tests that we will be filming at Imperial College for the new concrete Stuff Failure videos. Thank you to everyone who responded to our questions about appropriate tests. Reinforced Concrete Elements We

New concrete films to be recorded at Imperial College and produced by Aeries Films

We are delighted that we will be cooperating with Dr. Sunday Popoola and his time to produce the CONSTRUCT-funded concrete videos that we are producing for Expedition Workshed. The videos will be shot in the civil and environmental engineering department’s newly refurbished

CONSTRUCT agrees funding for new concrete Stuff Failure videos

CONSTRUCT, the concrete structures group has agreed to fund the creation of a suite of videos to teach students about the behaviour of reinforced concrete. These will feature in the concrete section of the Stuff Failure room on Workshed. Think Up will