UCL Engineering Challenges team receive award for excellence in engineering education

At the annual SEFI Conference in Tempere, Finland, Dr Fiona Truscott and her team received the 2025 SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award of Excellence for Developing Learning and Teaching in Engineering Education (Team Award), for their work on the Engineering Challenges module. 

The award recognises teams and individual teachers for innovative contributions to engineering education, such as open-minded curriculum development, learning environments or tools, novel didactics, methods or systems in engineering studies.

Engineering Challenges is a compulsory Year 1 module in all UCL undergraduate degree courses that follow the Integrated Engineering Programme. Nearly 1,000 students embarked on this module at the start of this academic year. 

Rather than following a traditional lecture-based mechanic, the module centres challenge-based, interdisciplinary- and team-based learning, based on authentic, socially relevant projects devised by module staff in collaboration with industry. One of its aims is to form a foundation for how students conceptualise good work; rather than trying to reach a singular correct answer, they are encouraged to experiment, embrace failure and develop defensible solutions. In Fiona’s own words, a student can achieve excellent marks with a failed prototype in this module – if they can explain how their data is wrong and why their prototype didn't work. 

This is a necessarily hands-on module to coordinate, made exceptionally challenging by its scale. It nurtures but also expects what for some students can be a radically different way of working, along with a wide range of other skills. 

Reflecting on the achievements recognised by the award, we ask Fiona how the module guides students’ academic, professional and personal development in this way; how she and her team coordinate effective teaching for so many students from multiple departments every year; students’ experience of the module; and how she got involved to begin with. 

Ultimately, a lot of it comes down to good teamwork, Fiona says. “We practise what we preach." 

Watch: Interview with Dr Fiona Truscott about the Engineering Challenges team winning the SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award (Team Award)

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Read more about the Integrated Engineering Programme on our website.