The Festival celebrated 150 years of pioneering engineering education at UCL since 1847, when the UK’s first engineering teaching laboratory was established by Alexander Kennedy. Since then UCL has reimagined how engineering is taught globally.
The festival’s programme was built around four themes of climate, healthcare, data and inequality, and was packed with opportunities to do, as well as see, with over 80 demonstrations and workshops, 22 spotlight events, and 20 labs opened to school groups. Over 7,000 visitors attended, to see highlights including:
- The opportunity to drive a Mars rover at the Mission to Mars event
- A live link to the International Space Station, where attendees took part in a Q&A with NASA astronaut Dan Tani and broadcaster Kevin Fong.
- The chance to join ‘Bakeneer’ Andew Smyth, creator and judge of Netflix's Baking Impossible, in an edible exploration of the engineering that helps us safely travel around the planet.
- An exploration of what would a fully recyclable world look like with materials engineers, including Professor Mark Miodownik and Associate Professor Helen Czerski.
- A look forward to the future of medicine, from vaccines to medical imaging to AI-assisted surgery.
- A series of talks aimed at the general public, from big questions like ‘Can Engineers Save the World?’ to quickfire presentations by current UCL students on their area of research.
