Developing sports engineering education in Australia

Abstract

This paper presents some examples of teaching material used in Australia's first sports engineering degree programme. In an Australian context, the field of sports engineering education is very young. Despite the growth of sports engineering degree programmes, there is no clear description outlining sports engineering as a discipline. Although sports engineering programmes typically incorporate aspects of existing courses in the broad fields of mechanical and electronic engineering, there are other skills that are specifically required for sports engineers to possess. Over many years, traditional engineering fields have developed a plethora of quality teaching textbooks and course syllabi. Due to the recent growth of sports engineering as a field, there is a distinct lack of such material. One approach of dealing with this issue is to adopt the use of blended learning, merging suitable refereed scientific publications with traditional engineering theory, to problems applicable to sports. A number of international journal and conference series are dedicated to sports engineering, and these offer a wide breadth of up-to-date material; however, the suitability of this literature for educational purposes is not clear. In light of this gap, sports engineering in the Australian education system requires a clearer definition, and also some examples of suitable teaching material. These issues will be explored in this paper, and some solutions will be addressed. Although the paper is focussed on the Australian system, the broad findings are applicable world-wide. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.