All societies develop their own engineering solutions to the common problems of housing, sustenance and health. The chosen solutions are the result from combining practical actions with what is philosophically acceptable to particular social groupings. Research has demonstrated that Australian Aboriginal peoples had 40,000 years to devise and implement ways to survive and live comfortably in the wide range of climatic conditions of the Australian continent (Blainey, 2015). Clearly succeeding generations were educated about how to sustain these appropriate combinations. While the vast time scale is now generally accepted, what is less well understood is the manner in which those engineering solutions contributed to creating a stable, long-lived, diverse and sophisticated set of inter-connected national cultures. At the time of European settlement these solutions had been in place for thousands of years, but were so different from solutions familiar to the new arrivals that they were virtually invisible to the newcomers. This 'invisibility' made it difficult for succeeding generations – both newcomers and traditional occupants - to value the achievements of those Aboriginal nations. Today they are scarcely understood or seldom acknowledged, yet they continue to have the potential to teach modern engineers much about how to live on this continent sustainably.
This workshop presents the results of an OLT project focused on Indigenous Student Support Through Indigenous Perspectives Embedded in Engineering Curricula (Goldfinch, et al 2013).
The project team comprised Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics from three Australian universities, and this workshop presents the results of their collaboration.
Simulation - all forms from engineering specific to role play based scenarios, virtual worlds, virtual reality, complexity and 21st century learning strategies
