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The lecture hall at the School of Engineering is filled with keen listeners once again. The traditional closing seminar of the Electrical Engineering Workshop is about to start. The amazing pieces of work created by the groups in their projects this year were also admired by a group of the school’s alumni attending the seminar.

During the autumn of 2015, a motion sensing anti-aircraft gun, a party copter, a radio-controlled motorbike, a laser-scanner, a moving soft toy and much more had been assembled.

The leader of the course, Kimmo Silvonen, and the audience were clearly pleased with what they saw, and expressed that with laughter and a storm of applause.

‘This year the students really were inspired and created amazing masterpieces using electronics. The students pass their enthusiasm on to the audience and the teacher,’ Silvonen rejoices.

The students’ learning curve is extremely steep, and in most cases the groups literally get immersed in the projects. This is what also happened to the group that built the radio-controlled motorbike.

‘You wonder for a while what you should be doing at the beginning of the course, but by doing things yourself you learn fast. I chose this course because it’s so different from the other courses,’ says Elisa Pokkinen, a second-year student of Energy and Environmental Technology.

The group’s original idea was to build a robot that pedals a bicycle. However, along the way, they had to alter their ambitious project slightly.

‘The aim was to keep the motorbike upright and to control the steering so that the bike would turn. When we managed to do this and there was still some time before the seminar, we added the radio control,’ say Markus Sarlin and Samu Kallio, first-year students of Automation and Systems Technology.

An inspiring and motivating course

The final pieces of work made by the participants of the Electrical Engineering Workshop in autumn 2015 were on display until the 16 December. The course is organised twice a year during the spring and autumn terms, and the seminar brings together the audience and the students in the premises of the School of Electrical Engineering in Otaniemi.

The Electrical Engineering Workshop was organised for the first time in autumn 2013. Students found the course inspirational and motivational and enjoyed the supportive and positive atmosphere. The aim of the course was to find out in practice where theory in needed, and the course has been praised by both students and actors outside the school. The course is mainly directed to first-year students, but more and more enthusiastic participants from all Aalto University schools join the course every year.