Recently, almost 1,800 students from primary and secondary schools across South Dublin County took part in a variety of events for Engineers Week 2019. The events were held by a number of local organisations in order to celebrate the world of engineering. Engineers Week is a week-long festival of nationwide events to engage primary and secondary students and to promote engineering as an exciting future for them to consider and what a week it was! From listening to our industry visitors to taking part in a “Rocket Launch”, the TUDublin Tallaght campus has seen it all. The Opening Ceremony was hosted by Principal Thomas Stone, welcomed industry influencers such as Shirley McDonald of Engineers Ireland, Sean Keating CEO of Vilicom, Niamh Murphy, Projects Commercial Manager PM Group, Peng Lim Director of Mixed Signal Design at Xilinx and Caitriona Lambert, Senior Executive Engineer, SDCC to talk to the students about their journey and experience within their sector. The keynote speech was delivered by Donagh Kelly Group Deputy CEO KN circet Group and founder of KN Group.
Each day throughout the week a number of events took place across the county, organised by five partner organisations; TUDublin – Tallaght, South Dublin County Council, PM Group, Xilinx and Vilicom. Primary school pupils enjoyed a “hands-on” learning activity based in the advanced Xilinx plant in Citywest, building electronic circuits and experimenting with Virtual Reality and Machine Learning technologies. They recorded and distorted their voices, learned how to transmit radio signals, and even played music using bananas! TUDublin – Tallaght hosted a ‘Women in Engineering’ seminar and three young women, Tatenda Mudehwe, Rachel Dunwoody, and Aoife Maria Ryan described their contribution to this dynamic industry. South Dublin County Council hosted ten primary school classes at County Library, Tallaght for K’Nex Workshops and invited a further 770 primary school children to three engineering adventure roadshows at Tallaght Stadium.
PM Group hosted six construction workshops for primary schools using LEGO and included a tour of Tallaght Stadium. In conjunction with South Dublin County Council, they also hosted a public lecture at RUA RED Arts Centre about the new Waste-to-Energy Facility at Poolbeg in Ringsend, which handles all of the non-recyclable waste in the Greater Dublin Area. The construction of this facility was project managed by PM Group. In all, 1,786 pupils from both primary and secondary schools were engaged during the week. 2019 was the 11th year of Engineers Week in South Dublin County. The week aims to promote engineering to primary and secondary school students through locally organised events, challenges, lectures and activities.
