Welcome to the course

Welcome to our course on ‘Engineering the Future – Creating the Amazing! Over the next three weeks we will be exploring the concepts of sensors, signals and systems, and in the process, encouraging you to rethink everything you thought you knew about engineering.

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Recognise the potential of modern engineering to change the world.
• Summarise the underlying component skills needed for successful engineering.
• Relate mathematical and scientific concepts to real-world engineering applications.
• Discuss the context of modern engineering and its role in society.
• Predict future developments in technology and describe their own potential role in achieving them.

Please note that there is no active tutor facilitation on this course.

Get extra benefits, upgrade your course

You can now get extra benefits by upgrading this course, including:

• Unlimited access to the course: Go at your own pace with unlimited access to the course for as long as it exists on FutureLearn.
• A Certificate of Achievement: To help you demonstrate your learning we’ll send you a Certificate of Achievement when you become eligible.

How this all works

You will work independently through the course at your own pace. All of the course content is now available to you, so if you need to, you can work ahead – but as social learning is an important part of the course it would be best if we tried to work through it together! We strongly recommend that you participate in the discussions and share your learning experiences.

Each week will have a theme, and we’ll learn about it through videos, articles and discussion. There will also be other optional tasks and exercises you can try to enhance your learning. Each week builds on the last, so we strongly recommend you work through each week in order. Each week should take you 3 to 4 hours to complete, if you do all the tasks, and there is a test at the end of each week to give an indication of what you’ve learnt.

Using FutureLearn

If this is your first FutureLearn course, you may find it useful to read the ‘how it works’ guide. We also recommend reading five tips and tools for social learning on FutureLearn to get the most out of the interactive and social learning features of this course.

Engage on social media

We have a hashtag – #CreatingTheAmazing – which you are more than welcome to use on social media to talk about the course and to find others who are talking about it too!

Let’s get started

This week we’ll look at the sensors, signals and systems that engineers are innovating to keep us healthy and improve our well-being. We’ll find out how engineers are inventing ingenious new ways to more accurately diagnose disease. We’ll close our eyes and open our ears, to consider how music and sound can influence our movement, our mood and our health. But first up we’ll think about keeping fit! You might already own a fitness tracking device – but have you ever thought about how the next generation of wearable sensors might revolutionise the future of healthcare?

So, let’s get started! (And when you have finished reading a section, please “Mark as complete”, and move onto the next step).