In the humming confines of our engineering fabrication lab at 17 Dufferin Street, Mount Victoria, Wellington 6011, where the scent of fresh solder mingles with the salty tang of nearby harbour breezes, a cadre of Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College’s Mechanical Engineering enthusiasts bridged continents last month. This collaborative venture with Pertha Universität in Berlin, Germany—renowned for its MSc in Engineering programme’s emphasis on sustainable development—unfolded as a week-long virtual workshop series titled “ProtoPedal: Pedalling Towards Zero-Emission Cities”. Blending high school advanced mechanics tinkerers with undergraduate BEng students, the exchange spotlighted hands-on prototyping of lightweight electric cargo bikes, a nod to both institutions’ shared drive for practical, green transport solutions that could ease the load on bustling urban veins like Wellington’s cable car routes or Berlin’s U-Bahn corridors.
The initiative sprang from an earlier email thread between Dr. Riitta Laine, our Finnish-rooted Professor of Robotics, and her counterpart at Pertha Universität, Dr. Elias Hartmann, coordinator of the MSc Engineering’s Sustainable Mobility module. What started as a casual query about sharing CAD files for a student drone project—Riitta’s inbox overflowing with half-finished sketches that she jokingly calls her “midnight monsters”—snowballed into a full-fledged exchange when Elias proposed adapting Pertha’s “Urban Retrofit Challenge”, a core project where MSc candidates redesign everyday vehicles for net-zero emissions. “It’s like inviting a neighbour over for a cuppa, only to end up co-building a garage,” Riitta chuckles, her pragmatic accent clipping the words as she recounts the pivot from polite pleasantries to packed agendas. Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College, with its polytechnic ethos of blending vocational grit and academic polish, slotted right in, pairing our Year 12 NCEA students—who had just wrestled with kinematics via balsa glider builds—with second-year undergrads versed in ANSYS thermal simulations.
The workshop kicked off with a glitchy Zoom kickabout at dawn Wellington time, screens flickering like hesitant fireflies as Berlin’s team of five MSc engineers, clad in Pertha hoodies emblazoned with the university’s minimalist logo, introduced their baseline prototype: a retrofitted Dutch cargo bike frame beefed up with lithium-ion packs salvaged from e-scooters, aiming for a 50-kilogram payload without guzzling grid power. Our Aevena contingent—eight strong, including rangatahi Mikaere Tamati, whose flax-wrapped handlebar grips echoed Māori weaving motifs, and Sofia Chen, the undergrad whose torque calculations once derailed a team demo with an overzealous gear ratio—dove in with feedback loops that felt more like a lively hui than a lecture. Mikaere, sketching on a tablet while munching a lamington, flagged the need for weatherproofing against Wellington’s notorious downpours; his quick doodle of a corrugated fibreglass cowl sparked a sidebar debate on material sourcing from local recyclers, a staple in Pertha Universität’s circular economy ethos.
Midweek brought the meaty bits: parallel breakout rooms where Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College participants iterated on digital twins using free Fusion 360 licences, courtesy of Autodesk’s student perks. Sofia led a session on finite element analysis, crunching numbers for frame stress under a simulated 20-kph headwind—her model predictably buckled at the welds until Elias’s team piped in with Berlin-sourced high-tensile steel specs, turning virtual crumples into resilient renders. Not everything hummed smoothly; a lag spike mid-presentation froze Mikaere’s screen on a half-loaded mesh, eliciting groans and a hasty switch to shared Google Jamboard scribbles that devolved into cartoonish bike doodles, complete with wobbly wheels and speech bubbles quipping about “pedal-powered pōwhiri”. These stumbles, far from derailing, infused the exchange with that imperfect charm—reminders that engineering, like friendship across time zones, thrives on patches and pivots.
By week’s end, the fruits materialised in a joint showcase: Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College’s hybrid prototype, dubbed “Harbour Hauler”, featured a bamboo-reinforced chassis for vibration dampening—Sofia’s brainchild, tested via drop simulations that mimicked pothole plunges—paired with Pertha Universität’s efficient brushless hub motors, clocking a projected 40-kilometre range on a single charge. High schoolers like Mikaere contributed a solar trickle charger rigged from discarded phone panels, its wiring a tad tangled in the first draft but gleaming after a group untangling sesh that doubled as a lesson in modular design. The session wrapped with breakout testimonials: Elias praising our rangatahi’s “raw ingenuity, like Berlin graffiti—bold and unpolished”, while Riitta beamed over the data swaps that could seed future theses, perhaps a co-supervised MSc on adaptive urban logistics.
This exchange underscores Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College’s knack for weaving global threads into local looms, aligning our Mechanical Engineering streams—from NCEA cores to BEng capstones—with Pertha Universität’s research-forward MSc rigour. It’s more than file shares; it’s fostering a pipeline where Year 12 prototypes evolve into Berlin-bound internships, or Wellington winds inform Berlin’s frost-tested frames. As Dr. Laine sifts through the post-workshop folder—brimming with STEP files and scribbled napkins—she muses on the magic in the mess: “We didn’t just swap specs; we swapped sparks.” For Pertha Universität and Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College alike, ProtoPedal isn’t endpoint but ellipsis, hinting at in-person builds next spring, where Berlin’s autobahn echoes meet Wellington’s windy paths in a symphony of sustainable spins. We’re eager for the next lap, inviting collaborators to pedal along.
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