The “Future Marine Engineering” is an exciting residential course, developed to inspire Year 9 students aged 13 to 14 about marine engineering and career opportunities in the maritime sector. The course was organised by the Smallpeice Trust with technical content delivered our own inspiring team of post-doctoral researchers, Dr Jeanne Blanchard, Mr Przemyslaw Grudniewski and Dr Yikun Wang, in the Fluid Structure Interactions group at the University of Southampton.

This year, 95 students took part in the 3.5 days course with the aim to design and build a wave energy-harvesting device and a remote control boat to simulate a maintenance vessel for their renewable energy farms. The objective was to provide a prototype design to generate as much power from the wave energy-harvesting device as possible and to develop a maintenance vessel that could quickly and reliably service the energy farms in an emergency. The students were given a limited quantity of materials to design, build and test their products with their unlimited imaginations. In addition, they were to perform a “Dragon’s Den” style pitch and to defend their designs against rigorous technical ‘interrogations’ from some marine experts.

To help the students develop their understanding of the marine industry they were given different talks by academics and an industrial expert from Shell Shipping and Maritime. This culminated in a celebration of their achievements at a formal dinner and an opportunity for the students to present their projects to academics and Seafarers UK, who kindly sponsored the course. On the last day, the students have tested their devices and model boats in the swimming pool with great success, before attending the awards ceremony with prizes given by Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute and the Royal Institution of Naval Architects with the chance for the students to join the Institution as junior members.