Foreword

 

This blog is the outcome of the module INGE0012 "Scientific research in engineering and its impact on innovation” on offer at the Universite de Liege.

The course is offered to engineering students at the master level. The first edition (2016-2017) was a project on cybernetics and the development of AI, whereas the second edition (2017-2018) was a project on turbulence.

 

Students were first assigned to read a few scientific papers, that were subsequently presented and put in context in two seminars given by two faculty members from the related disciplines. A special thanks to Professor Vincent Terrapon and to Professor Jean-Marie Beckers for their generous inputs to the course.

 

Each student engaged individually into bibliographical search with the task of identifying one “source” paper and one “impact” paper highlighting the origin and eventual technological impact of the research in turbulence. Each student prepared a written report on those papers and gave an oral presentation to the rest of the group.

 

During a full week seminar through the half of the term, students presented their individual work orally and discussed how to integrate the raw material into a general blog highlighting the history and the emergence of the digital technological age. The outcome of the week was roughly the table of contents of the blog and pointers from each student report to each relevant section.

 

The final blog was then prepared collectively through a sequence of steps. Each section was first written by a student, then reviewed by another student, and finally revised by the author student. Reviews and Revisions were all documented and accessible to all students. Integration tasks were also distributed among students. They included reviewing entire chapters, writing introductory material, selecting figures and writing captions, migrating the final text to a blog edition, and proof-reading.

 

At the end of the module, each student compiled an individual report summarising his or her personal contribution to each step of the entire project. Students were also asked to identify and to comment on what they had learned. 

 

For the second time, the response and engagement of the students in this unusual module has been overly positive. Many acknowledged that a key outcome of the module had been to realise that science and technology have a history, and that knowing the past is a great asset to shape the future.

Rodolphe Sepulchre