The Department of Engineering at King’s College London has been awarded one of the UK’s most prestigious higher education awards for their outstanding contribution to excellent teaching.
MaKE: Making at King’s Engineering, a multi-disciplinary team of academics, technicians and students centred around the Makerspaces in the Department, received a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) to celebrate how staff and students partnered to re-establish engineering at King’s and used design as a unifying thread to connect learning across the curriculum.
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A unique approach to education that seeks to flip traditional top–down didactic approaches to learning, their ‘create-first’ pedagogy connects key scientific and engineering principles to the skills necessary in industry and the social responsibility of the sector.
Each session is held in the Makerspaces of the King’s Quad, a series of design-learning spaces collaboratively designed and built by the team to actively encourage hands-on collaboration and skill sharing for real-world challenges. Technicians and academics work together with industry partners such as Autodesk to design projects that simulate the outside world of industry, encouraging the cross-disciplinary skills and perspectives needed to succeed in the workforce.
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By bringing together academics, technicians, students and professional services staff to work collaboratively, the team brings diverse technical expertise, lived experience and cultural and educational backgrounds to the department’s curriculum, educational ethos and spaces.
‘This is not a team that evolved by accident; it is one shaped intentionally to model the kind of collaborative, creative and inclusive engineering practice we want our students to take into their future careers,’ said Professor Claire Lucas, outgoing deputy head of engineering (education) and team lead. ‘I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together and the recognition of this award. Everything the team does – from space design to curriculum structure and staffing models – is intentionally aligned with the engineers they aim to develop. King’s engineers are socially responsible, collaborative problem-solvers with the technical, creative and entrepreneurial skills needed to tackle global challenges and shape a better future.’
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The Engineering Education Technical Team, which presides over the Quad Labs space, was also recently recognised with a Papin Prize for its dedication to student learning and technical excellence.
‘We’re really proud to receive a CATE award. It reflects the care, creativity and collaboration that run through everything we do – not just in design teaching, but across the whole department,’ said Francesco Ciriello, incoming deputy head of engineering (education) and deputy team lead. ‘Our students are partners in shaping their education, and our technical staff, who’ve also been recognised nationally with a Papin Award, make that possible. This recognition belongs to the whole community at King’s Engineering.’