Controlling and engineering systems for the benefit of all

Suitable for 14 to 19-year-olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom or shared with students online.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 Engineering, Mathematics and Science.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Professor Zi-Qiang Lang, an automatic control and systems engineer based at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Three of his former PhD students, a former PhD supervisor and Zi-Qiang share what it means to be an automatic control and systems engineer. Together, their commentaries highlight what is required to succeed in the field.
• If you or your students have a question for Zi-Qiang and his colleagues, you can submit it online – go to the article using the Futurum link below and scroll to the bottom of the page. They will reply!
• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy), to prompt students to reflect on Zi-Qiang’s research, and tasks them to devise a campaign to encourage others to explore careers in the field of automatic control and systems engineering.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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