As part of our recent Careers week at St Paul’s, a group of Year 12 students visited Dundalk Institute of Technology for a taster day in engineering and computer games development.

The students were given two practical sessions and demonstrations on the use of mathematics in engineering and computer science.

The engineers showed how maths is used in a variety of engineering fields including mechanical, civil and electronic engineering.  The students were shown the role of maths in developing and testing the components for building aircraft and other large machinery; measuring the flow of water in a river to predict flooding; and in building electronic circuits.

The computer games developers demonstrated how straight-line graphs and quadratic equations are used to model the movements of characters and objects in computer games.  The students were shown how the movement of a bullet in a game such as “Call of Duty” would have been created using mathematical equations.  They were then given the opportunity to work with 3D Max software to create their own “minion” characters.  This is the same professional software used by Disney Pixar and other film studios and computer games developers to create movies and games such as “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, “Avatar”, “Splinter Cell” and “Gears of War”.