Benefits for students and teams

• Put your engineering knowledge to the test with a competition as close to the real world as possible
• Gain practical experience of designing, manufacturing, optimising and testing a product alongside key soft skills, including team-working, time management, project management, budgeting and formal presentation skills
• Become a well-rounded and capable graduate engineer for your first role in industry  
• Make valuable connections and network with hundreds of like-minded students from universities across the UK and worldwide
• Learn more about the cutting-edge of UAS and drone technologies
• Meet and network with potential future employers during the live fly-off and team mentoring opportunities

Benefits for participating universities

• Complements academic studies with practical applications of course topics and experience of a real-world engineering project
• Enhance your university's opportunities for students and contribute to undergraduate recruitment activities
• Engage with industry partners in your curriculum and research activities
• Boost student satisfaction and motivation for project work
• Supports formal membership accreditation activities

Integration with university curriculum

The Challenge encourages students to follow a system engineering process, through requirements generation, design, manufacture, verification, and the final validation at the competition event. This can be integrated, including coursework exercises, into one or more units covering:

• Systems engineering
• Team projects
• Design projects
• Research projects
• Business/professional studies
• Aerodynamics/performance

Practical/lab exercises can be built around the testing skills needed. The Challenge provides a natural focus for team design or research projects.

Advice is available from other universities and companies who have successfully integrated it into their degree/graduate scheme; get in touch with us for more information.