To Teach Is Human

Through decades of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students, the author has had the opportunity to engage with them inside and outside the lecture theatre through inventive means in his interactions with them. This paper will describe, through the use of case studies, various innovative teaching techniques which have been used to motivate, inspire and inform many thousands of students to supplement the more conventional delivery of lectures, tutorials and laboratories, in person or on-line. These methods have been used over several years if not decades which, through refinement and student feedback, have been honed into a suite of enhancements to regular student contact now used annually across all levels of tertiary education engineering modules. It is a natural human response to wish to share acquired knowledge and skills and this paper aims to demonstrate how, with some imagination, generations of students can benefit even more from novel teaching and learning practices.