WHEREAS many student dreams are constructed in the classroom, sixty four undergraduate civil engineers have carved and dug themselves a place in history as the first in the UK to create real life construction projects thanks to a unique £30,000 donation from an enterprising contractor whose technical director is an alumnus.

The privileged students were given their own construction site in May and five days to build a concrete dam, a concrete arch bridge and a cable-stayed bridge.

Property developers, Stanhopes, donated vacant land at their Chiswick Park office estate and bulldozers and diggers from John Doyle Construction created a man-made river up to 12m wide and 90cm deep, fed by a fire hydrant.

The construction company also installed portacabins, portaloos, plant equipment and safety gear and their staff acted as consultants, subcontractors and safety overseers.

The 'Constructionarium' was cooked up between Chris Wise, civil & environmental engineering professor of creative design, and Peter Goring, Technical Director for Doyle, who studied civil engineering at Imperial between 1978 and 1981.

"In the end, engineering is about making things," commented Chris. "Where better to learn construction but on a real site with real concrete, real mud and grown up Tonka toys?

"We've been egging on the construction industry to help the students get their hands really dirty, and Doyle has risen to the challenge brilliantly. You only had to watch the students to see how much of a kick they got out of the whole enterprise...many said it was inspirational, one of the best things they had done in their whole time at College. They were so determined to make it a success, that they worked all hours to bring their projects in on time."

Adding to the gritty reality, student teams negotiated a price for their project with their client while keeping within budget as costings were scaled up to real life. They chose between slow but cheap manual labour or quick but costly machine-operators, experiencing how to make critical management decisions as well as technical decisions.

Lecturer Alison Ahearn applied for a Teaching Development Grant to capture progress on film, using Colin Grimshaw and Martin Sayers of the Imperial College TV Studio.

"The event was really an adventure with no guarantee of success, but the students and staff made it succeed," she explained.

"Everyone's impressions were recorded at all the different stages of the project, and it was clear early on that some teams had 'too much democracy' and technical decisions were not being made quickly enough. Staff had to learn to bite their tongues and resist the temptation to give students too many 'pointers'.

"By the fourth day, all teams had climbed steep learning curves and their productivity had shot up. The interviews show a move from anxiety to cautious optimism then elation as all completed their tasks successfully."

Peter Goring concluded: "It's been an emotional experience. The majority of students hadn't been on a site before and there were many 'penny dropping' experiences when you could see from their faces that something had fallen into place.

" One of the things you can get out of engineering is the ability to stand back and say you've done something. That's not the experience you get in a classroom — when I was a student, all I had to go on was the experience of my peers and what I could find in text books.

"Civil engineering needs to re-invent itself and become more popular as a career choice.

"Providing practical experience without over-doing it is one way to achieve that, and a similar project to this one could well be repeated in future years."