Communication is essential in engineering projects, as the Communication Breakdown event proves.
(Edmonton) Ten lunch bags, 100 Lego pieces assembled in not-so-easy-to-describe objects-this was no ordinary task. Staged by the Engineering Students' Society as part of the annual National Engineering and Geosciences Week, Communication Breakdown lies at a creative intersection of things engineers love most-designing and creating, and last but not least - communicate.
Communication Breakdown emphasises the importance of precise and accurate interaction in engineering.
"What this event does is help you identify how specific you can be and how carefully you can choose your words. It can be something very simple in your field, but not giving specific instructions can be frustrating. This is common when you go on a site visit and have to do an inspection," said Raymund Sampaga, one of the creative minds behind the Lego objects and a third-year civil-environmental engineering student.
Here's how it works: You and your partner pick a lunch bag containing an object made of Lego. It can be anything from a funny-looking nuclear plant to an exotic one-humped camel. Standing back-to-back, your teammate describes the object you have chosen and guides you through the construction process. Your job is to follow instructions and put together Lego pieces to replicate the assembly.
"It was challenging for us to communicate. The hardest thing was to describe how many spots away the bricks were from each other," said mechanical engineering student Josh Nguyen, one of the first participants of the challenge.
Benjamin Yeung knows the importance of communication in engineering. "There's a lot of talking involved in engineering-talking about what you built, and it's important."
While all the participants had the same objective in mind-show the best time in assembling the pieces-they used different communication strategies. "We tried a Cartesian co-ordinate system first. When it failed us, we switched to a linear system," said Adrian Chua, third-year environmental engineering student.
This year's winners assembled a Lego object, an IKEA-style table, in only 50 seconds.
"It is a fun take on how to work with other people," adds Chua.