Research Fellows
Marios Damigos
Early Stage Researcher 5 at Engys IT
The outreach activity was completed in collaboration with ESR 6 in December 2017.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) as well as optimization are of great importance when designing aerodynamic shapes. Most people are not aware of this importance since science and engineering are not familiar to individuals not affiliated to these topics.
The target of our outreach activity was therefore to engage with young people in order to help them develop an interest in these subjects. The natural choice was to engage with high school students since their professional interests are in a pre-mature state. Furthermore, we both realized that simple fluid-mechanic related subjects were a mystery back in our high school days. We proceeded to create a presentation that would contain basic information about the importance of CFD in industry and academia. We included very many examples of CFD simulations and fluid mechanics applications and demonstrated results in a very simple way. At the end of the activity we had a discussion with the students to hear their thoughts and answer their questions.
The activity took place in a high school in Greece during the school hours. We made this decision since we are both greek nationals and therefore it seemed best to present in our mother tongue and in a place where we were both raised. We chose school hours because we believed that the information we wanted to share would be best received by the students in their natural learning environment during their school lessons and not in their free time.
In both our opinions the activity proved to be a success. The students gave us a lot of feedback in the form of questions. Most of those questions showed us a desire to dive deeper in the subjects we talked about. We were also very much benefited by this activity. None of us had done any outreach activity before so this was a great chance to develop our transferable skills. We look forward to doing something similar again.