TRADA University Engagement Programme
Challenges, the curriculum and climate literacy: a bright future for timber and engagement Tabitha Binding, TRADA’s University Engagement Manager, reports. TRADA University Challenge 2020 Supported by major sponsors STEICO and Arnold Laver, sponsor Stora Enso, and supporters Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification UK, Passivhaus Trust, Western Timber Trade Association and Wood for Good, the 48-hour competition, which took place 17–19 February 2020, saw 58 students from universities across the UK gather at Cardiff University to compete to design, cost and engineer new homes. The brief given by Wales & West Housing Association for a large rural site at Adams Drive, Narberth, Pembrokeshire, laid out real-life constraints for the students to address: affordable housing that is low-carbon, energy and water efficient, climate resilient, healthy and desirable. Each team consisted of student engineers, architects, architectural technologists, quantity surveyors and landscape architects, and received hands-on support from pioneering design professionals and industry members, including judges from Mikhail Riches, Cullinan Studio, Stride Treglown, Ramboll, Buro Happold, Entuitive, Gardiner & Theobald and PLAN:design. Posters and models from the four winning teams displayed at Futurebuild in March attracted lots of attention and so lectures, talks and live projects were talked about, booked and then... Covid-19 took everything from on site to online almost overnight.
The curriculum New curriculum guidelines for the development of engineering degree programmes, issued by the Joint Board of Moderators in March 2020, included a requirement to integrate sustainable development into existing teaching and learning, and stipulated that students must graduate aware of climate change, the low-carbon agenda and the effect of material choices. This has opened the door to timber being taught on a par with other construction materials. TRADA has consequently drawn together an online working group of engineering lecturers and professionals from across the UK to address the teaching of timber.
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Timber 2021 Industry Yearbook
Engineering students undertaking a pilot module in the structural behaviour of timber beams. Photo: Tabitha Binding
Prior to the engineering working group being set up, a pilot of the module Structural tests on timber beams – developed by Dr Zhongwei Guan and Dr Jürgen Hackl at the University of Liverpool’s School of Engineering – took place. Working in small teams, 130 second-year engineering students undertook the module enabling them to understand the structural behaviour of timber beams with different grades and to learn how to conduct a structural test to obtain key parameters and characterise structural performance. Timber was donated by the North West Timber Trade Association and James Jones & Sons Limited. The architecture curriculum is in the process of being updated with tensions developing around the call for more technical climate literate knowledge integration. Students, tutors, lecturers and professionals under the umbrella of Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) are campaigning to embed three aims into the curriculum: decarbonisation, ecological regeneration, cultural transformation.
Climate literacy To encourage design students and their lecturers to become climate literate and understand how they have the power to greatly
