A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
The BloodhoundSSC Project (Super Sonic Car) project is working to design test and run a car to raise the world land speed record to 1 000 mph as a platform to stimulate STEM engagement across the educational age range from primary to university level. BloodhoundSSC has adopted a patent-free Open Educational Resources (OER) approach in which a significant proportion of the technical and operational details from the project are being made available for use in schools colleges and universities. Bloodhound@University was conceived and set up by the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE) as the interface between the BloodhoundSSC engineering team and the university sector and has two areas of activity: a special interest group and a web-based repository for holding and providing access to project data known as the K-Box – http://bloodhound.eprints.org.
The presentation will share the experience of developing OER teaching resources in parallel with the ‘live’ development of the world land speed record car. Areas that will be discussed include: strategies for interfacing with the engineering team; the challenges of contextualising data from the project for use by academics/students; approaches to stimulating engagement with the project and its data; mechanisms to encourage use and re-use of content from the repository; opportunities for “crowd-sourced” design development through engagement with academics/students; and an overall reflection on the OER and STEM opportunities that this project has provided.
