Reader, they succeeded. The students built their structures and all were seen in final form. Not that there were not some difficulties along the way for some.

The Don Valley Stadium made it look relatively easy in the end, as did the Kingsgate team. The Kingsgaters had staged their anti-nuclear protest the day before and been doused with a bucket of water for their troubles, but seemed to enjoy it. They had been wary of reprisals but their structure escaped unscathed. They made a grand banner to proclaim their achievement and decorated their bridge (next year we must assign fewer students or increase the difficulty level… but it was good management that got them there so fast). The Don Valley team had a most excellent structure for taking photos of a team…the risers for seats made a perfect raked photo stage. The project involves foundation work, concrete walling, steel superstructure and craning piece A to fit slot B (harder to do at big scale than it sounds). A very efficient team.

The Naples team and Gherkin teams finished almost in tandem, and pulled rabbits out of hats to achieve it. A little help from technician friends gave a boost along the way: concrete drilling is a bit more of a challenge when the tools are running out of battery charge. But the structures completed and looked correct to your correspondent’s eyes.

The Nuclear Island team had a real challenge. Having been given seriously fancy fibreglass formwork for their dome, which had concrete poured amidst the chaos of VIP day, the concrete cured and did not want to let go of the formwork. Expensive formwork. Not cheap plywood. Commissioned-from-specialists formwork. Oh dear. All the pressure hoses and drilling and air-gap-creating would not persuade the concrete to loosen its grip on the fibreglass form. So the dome was craned into position with its formwork inside. Perhaps this is not quite how a nuclear client would envisage things, but we all learned a great deal about fibreglass formwork from a civil engineering point of view.

And the students all had their finished structure that looked like it was meant to look. They all had much to be proud of in a hectic week with multiple pilot schemes operating, including one that collected data for an American-Italian-British research team on construction management. Students had all sorts of calls on their time and attention, including a bunch of VIPs who really were very important to the future of constructionarium as a teaching model. Yet the student teams each finished and did very well.

A round of final meetings with the client produced a list of profit and loss. Student project leaders then took everyone to visit their structure and tell their tales. The rain came down, went away, came down, went away.

The coaches arrived, the students grabbed their snacks, we packed them in, counted them up, waved goodbye and raced back to Imperial to welcome them back to London. Staff collected the survey kits from the coaches and ferried it back to the Skempton building to store it for the night, and then the big escape home by midnight.

Was every student happy? The event is too challenging for everyone to be in their comfort zone but most seem very pleased with themselves. Was the construction perfect? impossible when the vast majority are novices, we are racing the clock and don’t have the money resource of normal construction (albeit we are very spoiled by our sponsors, as it is). Was it worth it? Most definitely. Huge shifts in understanding of what it is to be an engineering on site, interpreting someone else’s design into a 3-D reality against the 4th dimension of time. And, as usual, the students did Imperial proud.

For old-time teachers on Constructionarium, it is sometimes hard to remember that, whilst you have seen a structure built multiple times, your current students have not. Reminding ourselves of this simple truth, the achievements of the students become much greater.

Yes, there has been concern over the inability of some teams (or team managers) to act upon advice.

Yes, there is some concern about teams where they just havent registered how little time they have left for physically attaching hundreds of bits to hundreds of other bits (the latticework of struts between the timber ribs that spring from the steel cleats on the concrete columns rising from the ring-beam of the weather canopy for Naples Airport Tube Station Entrance springs to mind).

But there is some sheer poetry in the finesse that some teams have brought to their projects. One group is so far ahead that they left site in order to save labour costs and rented out some of their workers to other needy teams. They estimate a saving of £66k, which is worthwhile by anyone’s standards, even if the money on these projects is notional.

The Kingsgate team had time to spare today, so they decided to have fun and run a nuclear protest over at the Bircham B nuclear island power station project. They staged a demonstration outside the security fence that makes the nuclear group a site within a site. But the nuclear group took a strong approach: a bucket of water did seem to douse the flames of the protesters’ pseudo anger. The protest was environmental because some polystyrene from the formwork for the domed roof of the nuclear island had found its way into the Kingsgate river system. This breach of construction waste control provoked the protest.

Retaliation may or may not have occurred: the Kingsgate team left site and repaired to their accommodation for a rest before dinner. This is unheard of in the lore of Constructionarium, but cannot be faulted on engineering grounds. Watching concrete cure is not something that a team need do. They cleaned up their site and their portacabin, to get ahead for final day. Jawdroppingly mature management from an undergraduate team.

Fortunately, some of the other teams are conforming to more normal patterns of progress. The Don Valley team impresses with their ability to “see one, do one” and they seem to have good time control and an ability to deploy human resources (or “use workers wisely”, in the language of normal people).

The Nuclear Project team featured on BBC Radio and BBC Norfolk’s “Look East” news programme, which is great fun. But getting filmed is something that does not mesh well with staying on programme and making good use of workers.  The VIP’s, however, have been making contact with staff and showing immense enthusiasm. It is good news and great credit to all the teams for being able to cope with visitors whilst juggling time, cost, quality and maintaining safety on their projects.

The Gherkin tower begins to rise, so we hope for a happy sunny photo with everyone on it on Friday.  Some might view the Gherkin tower as a giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle, which misses the point that it happens in 4-D with a race against time. That time creates pressure but the students will cope.

And one student, when asked what he thought of constructionarium, said “We should do this every six months: it would make such a difference.” That is a thought, for the organisers, both heartening (for the educational endorsement) and frightening (for the logistical effort it would entail).

It was VIP day at Constructionarium. Great and good and important people came to see whether Imperial’s students were doing something worthy of their attention and support generally and, in particular, on the nuclear engineering project. But it was still a construction day for all of the students. Looking back on it all, it seems that today the teams have swapped positions: the teams that were on track seem to have fallen behind.

How does that happen? How do you go from “in front” to “behind” in a day? It seems that teams that had their bases done and yesterday seemed “ahead”, have turned out to have been ahead because they didnt put any manpower on their other tasks. For instance, the Gherkin tower team put all effort into laying their foundations for their four-storey tower. They then “winged” it on their steel work for the tower itself: they have learned that it is wise to have a team member studying the steel drawings in minute detail so that, when the team needs to assemble the steel and place it on the foundations, they will know how to put it together, how many bolts are needed, what type and how to attach it to the foundation. Forgetting to grout and forgetting to level the the steel is, with hindsight, unwise. Their manager may have thought a team member was earnestly studying the steel drawings, but if they were, they were not understanding and they were not asking for help with their incomprehension. When you try to wing it with steel, you learn that civil engineering steel doesnt like to fly.

The Naples team needed every chippie (carpenter) on the site to get their column formwork in place, because the Neapolitans were beguiled by the magic of the self-installing ring beam. These are beams made of precast concrete segments that you assemble into a circular “low wall” and then excavate the ground from beneath them with a digger run by the wonderful, skilful Peter, who makes it look easy. He manipulates the digger fork the way a Neapolitan can scoop icecream. The students are lucky that our site is awash with apprentice carpenters from a training course at the construction college. No matter how glorious your ability to do partial differential equations, you develop respect for the people who can help you get the formwork for 23 columns in the right place in a short space of time. The idea of sub-teams doing work in parallel looks easy in the classroom back in South Kensington: making it all happen simultaneously on site is something else. But its a humdinger project with real engineering challenges and they have hauled back into line for their programme. But will the client be happy with the extra cost of the specialist tradesmen who helped them?

Don Valley is doing steady progresswith their section of a stadium. They are where Graham-the-contractor thinks they ought to be “so long as they are getting on with their steelwork at the same time” and that is the rub: the teachers/supervisors have to trust the students to be multitasking and we do not actually check and prod them. There is too much going on for that. The students are in charge of their projects. Team Don Valley only need to talk to the Gherkin team about the need for steel to be studied in advance of the start of works. But Graham concedes “Its a bit hard because you throw a load of drawings at a second year student and then expect them to get on with it” when they really are only second years and really very novice at turning drawings into physical reality. But on constructionarium that is how you learn.

Kingsgate were lagging on day 1, so their progress has been to catch up and now they have their bridge decks done, So they can relax just slightly because they have their embankments to do tomorrow while the concrete decks cure, so they have come behind to seem to be on course and where they should be. Their embankments involve earthworks that have to be built up to give you access to their footbridge when its finished, otherwise you’d need a ladder to reach the bridge’s deck, in uber flat Norfolk.

The Nuclear team had a mixed up day with a load of VIPs descending on them after visitng other projects briefly. The VIPs from the nuclear industry and construction industries were looking at Nuclear Island project to see whether it might help resolve the problem of finding enough engineers, of all grades, to build the power stations of the UK before 2050 (nuclear and all other power stations have limited design life and the whole of UK power generating stations of all types are due for renewal by 2050). So there is a great deal of interest in generating engineers and the Nuclear team were up front and on show. The BBC local TV news team came and filmed for 2 hours, to generate 2minutes on the evening local news. But two other film crews were there. A government senior advisor from industry looked at what they were doign (all teams) and a raft of skills and educationists inspected the viability of the Nuclear Island project as a teaching tool. To accommodate the BBC, the students’ were instructed to speed up the creation of formwork for their dome so a concrete pour could be filmed. But the film crew arrived, did the preliminary filming and then we found that the company had sent the wrong type of concrete for the dome (it was better suited to foundations than to tricky concrete curves on a polystyrene formwork). A compromise for the news team was found but students learned that the BBC does not fake it: an alternative bit of concreting was not going to be broadcast as a pretend dome pour: it had to be real. So it was real. Small but real. A challenge. Up against time limits. But done.

Well done? Depends on what your objectives were for the day. A concreting purist would not be best pleased, but the sponsors are well pleased with constructionarium making the news. The Mayor of Kings Lynn was there (in mayoral chains) and enthusiastic about this education event that pours a significant amount of money into the local economy. Accommodation, food, transport, concrete, steel, fixings, welfare provisions, tools, plant operators, equipment replacements, demolition works and everything else that goes into running constructionariums for 16 universities and over 800 students in a year has meant a real boon to the Construction College which is a major local employer in this rural area, and a boon to suppliers in the local area. The Mayor really likes Constructionarium. And so he should.

Morning

From Norfolk in the rain, those lessons about management back in cosy South Ken classrooms must seem like a bit of a dream. One of the lessons in civil engineering management is that you just cannot predict all risks though you can predict that unforeseen things will happen. Today’s unforeseen things were a rabbit and a bird family. The rabbits that abound in our rural construction classroom had decided that the floor decks for our four-storey Gherkin tower makes a great man-made burrow. The students were hard-hearted and turfed the rabbits out of their home (assured that mother nature does a better job). But they turned and found that the noisy bird who’d been flapping around was actually upset that the students were almost standing on top of her nest. And there were the three eggs she wanted to hatch. Smack bang in the middle of the place where the tower should be built. So, move the three tiny eggs or move the location of the tower? This is Britain, where the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is the biggest membership organisation in the country, so of course the students moved their tower despite the delay it would cause.

 Tales of real construction projects held up for 18 months because a Great Crested Newt decided to take residence in a rain puddle on a site were immediately doing the rounds. This is real life. Real engineering. Birds matter. No one puts birds in your exam paper but the birds dont know that so they take up residence where you were meant to start excavating your foundations. And so we have a lesson about respect for life, respect for nature, respect for doing the ethical and proper thing. No one planned it, and that is what makes it such a valuable lesson.

Afternoon

When students attend constructionarium, they have to take roles such as “project manager” or “safety officer” or “budget manager” or “power tool operative”, but few expected to have to take on “media officer”, but businesses need good client relations, and big projects in engineering tend to affect many other peoples’ lives: good communication skills are necessary for public inquiries and planning applications. The media officers are also handling various research projects where we need students to gather or generate data for the staff who are using the students as specimens in an educational ‘experiment’. Thus real glee ensued when the BBC rang up and said Radio Norfolk would like to do an interview and do we have any students willing to speak to the media?

Willing? Two turned up to speak and the media officers from all the other teams turned up to watch just to see engineering communications in action. And it seems you get little time to prepare and must be willing to be brief, accurate and trusting of the journalist who will edit your words. Your power as an engineer is to work with and sometimes conquer the forces of nature, but today students learned that it is very difficult to conquer the power of the media. We wonder what the editor has done with our words but all of Norfolk will find out when they listen to their radios tomorrow morning. Could we have scripted a better ‘lesson’ on engineering communications in a classroom: we think not.

- Alison Ahearn, Constructionarium lecturer

Alison Ahearn, Constructionarium lecturer:

There is nothing unusual about field trips with students. There is nothing unusual about quite difficult ones. But doing a construction field trip with 100 novices is always nerve-wracking because construction is an industry where even the experts have a death rate. And since I am one of the few non-engineers on site, it’s much more likely that one of my students could accidently kill me than that I would kill myself. So it is no surprise that we put the students through two full-on days of briefings and training on ways to obey the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. And it seems they have paid attention. They have arrived on site all geared up to conquer engineering in a week flat. And, despite rain, they seem likely to do it.

Camilla Nicholson, student:

After a week of solid sunshine in the capital, the students known as “second year civ eng” awake across SW London at 6am to a battering of rain. It’s the morning of constructionarium.  After a coach journey just long enough to catch up on our sleep, we arrive and are allocated our rooms. People quickly suss out who is living closest to the bar and  boastful phonecalls begin.

Then its dinner time – something Alison (our lecturer) had warned us about several times over the last few days. So we are relieved to find a feast of chicken burgers and vege as fuel. Its raining so hard that our first site visit is cancelled – but anticipation i building for the first day of construction (Monday) and the team gather in the Conference Centre to eagerly go over plans and speculation ov the week’s weather conditions for construction. Only time will tell.

Hamish MacKenzie, student:

So. Constructionarium. A brief moment of respite as we settle into our rooms after a sleepy coach journey. Then the discussions begin, and brows begin to furrow. It’s raining. It’s cold. We being to realise we have pretty limited knowledge of what we’re about to undertake. “We don’t even know what ‘formwork’ looks like!”.

Suddenly the glorious role of team leader loses its halo, but with top notch organisation and communication, our group leader brings a steady hand to the wheel of HMS Team Green, and an air of confidence makes a welcome return to the group.

Hello world,

This blog will follow the week long student engineering project Constructionarium 2011, involving engineering students, alumni, academics and staff from Imperial College London, together with volunteers from across the engineering and construction sector.

The Constructionarium is a hands-on construction experience for students and young professionals. The project is run each year by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Undergraduates take a week off lectures and go out into the field, where they use construction materials and methods to create structures such as buildings, bridges and dams. The initiative teaches undergraduates about the design and construction process and gives them insights into what it will be like to work as engineers on major projects when they graduate.

Constructionarium is held as a 6 day working field course. The participants construct scaled down versions of bridges, buildings, dams and civil engineering projects. Students are assessed on the final day in terms of budgetary control, methodology and timely completion.