Over the past three weeks, Coventry University has played host to over 40 students and 12 staff from four European countries who are all taking part in an engineering competition with a difference.

Students from each of the four international institutions taking part look on as one of the remotely-controlled hovercrafts is steered down the purpose-built circuit in Coventry University’s Jaguar Building, Gosford Street.

The second Intensive Programme for Embedded Digital Signal Processing (eDSP), which is funded by the European Union, has seen students from Germany, Finland (where the event was held last year) Lithuania and the UK working in mixed nationality teams of four to design, build and evaluate a small remotely operated Hovercraft.

On the final day, the teams competed against each other in assessing their hovercrafts’ ability to automatically follow a set path which consisted of painted lines, curves, bends and straight sections.

However, as well as the practical side to the project, the students also attended a series of focused lectures given by academics from the four countries and participated in a full cultural and social programme.

John Evans, Principal Lecturer, European Union Development Group from the Faculty of Engineering and Computing, said: “This is the first time to my knowledge that Coventry University has hosted such an event and it has been a huge success. The students have really enjoyed working alongside their peers from other partner universities and have found the whole experience very rewarding.

“The added bonus is that they not only worked together on the project, but socialised as well which is all part of the educational experience.”

Students from the victorious team each won a Coventry University sweatshirt to take back home with them to their respective countries and wear with pride!

Jamaki Prasad Koirala, a student from the Helsinki Metropolia Univeristy of Applied Sciences in Finland, said: “This is a new competition for me, and it’s very exciting. Last year the event was in Finland, but this year it’s a pleasure to visit Coventry to take part. Building these hovercrafts is a great way to learn and apply the sort of engineering skills that are needed in industry.”

Next year, more than ten Coventry University students will travel to take part in the same event in Lithuania and the following year, ten Coventry University students will travel to Germany to participate again.