SETU held its annual Engineering Festival 2025 across its campuses in Carlow and Waterford. The festival was an opportunity for hundreds of students from the southeast to learn more about the world of engineering, and to explore a potential future career path.
All the events were coordinated by Calmast, SETU's STEM Engagement Centre, with colleagues from SETU’s Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Engineers Ireland's South East Region, and Engineering the South East industry cluster.
Together the groups brought to life various engineering activities and games promoting creativity, critical thinking, and new ideas to students in the southeast.
Creativity in competition
The week saw activities like the K’Nex Challenge that introduced foundational concepts of engineering to students, while testing their skills and creativity in model making. The challenge allowed students to design and build an engineering model of an everyday invention, while competing with other teams to create the strongest, biggest, and fastest designs.
The Robotics challenge allowed students to design and build their own robot. Groups competed with one another for titles like ‘Best Design’, ‘Fastest Robot’, and ‘Best Programming’, as they raced their robots around a track.
Workshops and quizzes
Throughout the week students had the opportunity to take part in a multitude of quizzes and workshops designed to breakdown complex engineering ideas in fun and engaging ways.
Students discovered more about climate change and how to harness the power of wind through the ‘Wind Power Workshop’, where students calculated the power of a wind turbine.
The Transition Year Quiz saw students test their knowledge of STEM as they competed for fun prizes.
Engineering as a career
Towards the end of the week, students were invited to hear directly from a panel of engineers and the University’s own engineering lecturers. They spoke about their experiences in engineering and their journey on their current career paths.
Participants learned more about the various engineering and construction courses available at SETU and were given a tour of SETU’s diverse engineering workshops and state-of-the-art facilities. With the opportunity to step into the University’s real-life workshops, students discovered more about the world of robotics and automated systems, mechanical, biomedical, electronic, and aerospace engineering at SETU.
