Undergraduate Teaching Opportunities Programme (UTOP)

Student-initiated workshops

Our students are given opportunities to design and conduct their own workshops within and outside of SUTD. See our past student-initiated workshops and hear what our UTOPers say about their experiences.

Want your UTOP activity to be featured? Write to us at utop@sutd.edu.sg stating your email subject as “UTOP Feature”.

Fundamentals to Electronics Workshop

Tell us a little about your workshop

This workshop series aims to help participants in building up their Electronics skills. Participants will be introduced to common electronics components (like resistor, transistor, capacitor, inductor, LDR, voltage regulator and etc) and how to use basic engineering tools like soldering iron, wire stripper and multimeter. At the end of the workshop, participants will learn how to use the KiCAD EDA to create their own PCB.

What are some key takeaways from this UTOP experience

(Tan Pei Wen, Freshmore) The UTOP experience was highly valuable as the interactions with peers of congenial interests were both intellectual and engaging. As a teaching assistant, I had much to learn as well and I enjoyed the process of picking up new skills as I also figured out how to express them in ways such that they could be understood (E.g. analogies). Overall, I feel that this experience was both interactive and enjoyable.

(Lim Yi Shen, Freshmore) The UTOP experience was enjoyable. Initially, I thought I would have no problems translating what was taught into teaching others as I had experience with microcontrollers but it quickly turned into something I did not understand (multiplexing). Nevertheless, I sought to understand what I did not understand in order to help impart information more efficiently, and in doing so, grasped the fundamentals of electronics. As such, I learnt many new things in face of being an UTOP participant.

iUTOP – STEM Workshop for Underprivileged Children

Tell us a little about your workshop

Toy making is the most effective and enjoyable way for children to learn. We hope to expose children to STEM by using common inexpensive materials to create toys. They will be taught basic principles and mechanisms and asked to develop their own toys using their creative minds. We also get them to work as teams and present their masterpieces to improve their collaborating and communication skills.

Everposter Club Workshop

Tell us a little about your workshop

The graphic design workshop organised by the Everposter Club conveys basic computer software techniques on how to do great photo editing, posters, logo designs as well as laser-cut graphic designs. Participants are given some hands-on practices to complete after each session and a final poster design project.

What first inspired and made you and your team interested in organising a student poster design workshop under UTOP?

We felt that UTOP is a professional platform that can help to attract more student participants to our workshop. It also drives us to teach and mentor in a more professional manner. This helped us gain experience along the way, allowing us to discover how to conduct a workshop more effectively.

How do you hope that your workshop can help benefit the participants?

Our workshop teaches basic skills in Adobe Illustrator (AI) and PhotoShop (PS). AI and PS are very useful in poster making, especially for students in Term 2 and 3, where they have a lot of design projects to work on. We hope that the techniques taught in our workshop, in softwares such as AI, PS and CoreIDraw, can prepare the participants in incorporating these skills in poster designing, which can also be applied extensively throughout their other projects and even after they enter the workforce.