1 Engineering: a holistic approach

Often in an engineering project you will need to incorporate knowledge and skills from all areas of your experience: skills learned on the job, from your studies or, indeed, life skills. In this course, you are going to look at a short case study that considers material use in the manufacture of toys.

In this course, ‘toy’ is used to describe a range of items, including traditional toys, such as dolls and LEGO^®, sports equipment, such as cricket bats, and leisure equipment, like drones and hoverboards. The case study will concentrate primarily on materials use and development.

The main types of materials considered in this section are wood, synthetic polymers, composites and metals.