Engineering students from the University of Abertay Dundee have been gaining experience at Scotland's Constructionarium.

Second year BSc students undertook a week-long residential course and were given the challenge of building scaled-down versions of world-famous engineering projects.

The drawings given to each of the three groups were the Barcelona Tower, the Kingsgate Footbridge in Durham and a project designed especially for the Constructionarium called 'The Pavillion'.

The students then had to work out how to turn the drawings from 2D pictures on pieces of paper into 3D versions of the real thing.

The students worked alongside industry professionals to complete the tasks and take on the role of contractor, while the industry representatives took on the role of the "client" and "consulting engineer".

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Within each team, each student was given a specific role in order to gain experience as to what what working as a contractor on a building site is actually like.

Dr Cornelia Doerich-Stavridis, Programme Tutor for Civil Engineering at Abertay University who was on site with the students all week, said: "They had to do everything a real contractor on a real building site would do, like work out what building materials they would need and in what quantities, arrange for delivery of these materials and work out how much the whole project would cost.

"As well as all of the planning in the run-up to the week away, however, they also got to experience what it's like being on site as a structure is going up - that things can go wrong, for example, no matter how much planning you've done. One day, the steel work the teams had ordered didn't arrive on time for example, which held everything else up, and they had to adapt to the situation."

She added: "But they all really enjoyed the week. Sometimes students struggle to get out of bed for nine o'clock lectures, but they were up at 7am every day and on site by 7.30am, raring to go. They then worked flat out until 7pm most nights because they were so determined to get as much out of their time there as possible."

(IT)