Assessment

The purpose of the assessment is to demonstrate your awareness of the issues raised in this module. Also, as education has been a recurring theme of the solutions to the problems presented in this module, it is intended to give you practice in researching, collating and presenting information to your peers and thereby raising awareness about an issue that you feel strongly about.

The assessment will involve creating a learning resource based on the theme of this module (i.e. sustainability and engineering). The learning resource must be a poster or a presentation which will be presented to all other students who have completed this module at a one day event at the University of Nottingham. The presentation must be maximum 10 minutes long, after which you should answer any questions about the information you have researched.

Suggestions for what the poster or presentation could cover are below:

Introduction to the subject of choice

• Outline of current world wide / local situation
• Past and predicted future trends
• Reasons for the specific focus on the area you have chosen

What are the problems with the current situation?

• Indicators towards unsustainability
• Reasons for getting to the current situation
• Economic, social and environmental factors, links between them

What solutions exist?

• Government policy, organisations or individual actions
• Case studies of any of the above

Conclusions

• What are the best/ worst case scenarios for the future?
• What is your personal opinion of what chould be done to increase the sustainability of the topic you have chosen?

Further Reading

• List any relevant websites, videos, or online teaching resources that you have found useful.

You can focus on a wide and general topic or on a very specific localised issue. Your subject should in some way be related to engineering and sustainability. It doesn't have to be a subject covered specifically in this module, however if you do choose a subject from one of the chapters it should be covered in more depth than it already has. You could focus more on a problem or on a solution. You could even suggest a solution that doesn't exist yet!

Suggested titles:

• Can the UK support itself entirely from renewable energy?
• A case study of a low impact housing community in Wales
• Environmental consequences of waste electronic goods
• China's use of copper
• The embodied energy of electric cars
• Engineering solutions for reducing poverty (energy, water, healthcare etc)
• Wave/ Tidal Energy
• A summary of current predictions for peak oil
• The Transition Network - building resilient communities
• Permaculture in engineering - using nature as a design aid

Poster Guidelines

• A3 format
• Include pictures, text, charts and graphs
• Flow diagrams can explain processes concisely

Presentation Guidelines

• Information presented clearly
• Include text, charts, graphs and pictures
• Ideally should make sense without needing a presenter - i.e. can be a useful standalone online resource

General Guidelines

• Posters or presentations that are of a high standard will be included as part of the online learning resources for this module in U-Now, and will be available for future students to use as part of their studies.
• For this to be possible, any pictures, text (that is not your own), charts or graphs used from the internet should be appropriately referenced.
• Try to use resources with a creative commons license where possible (this will make it possible to include your work as part of the online resource)
• To achieve this use the internet search engine as follows: "your search term" + creative commons and look for the following logo:

• This means that the author has been attributed, the item is non-commercial and it is cleared for sharing (‘share-alike’).

 

More information about Creative Commons Licensing:

http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/