Cluster 12, the 24-Mark Lab Hour, and the Portfolio

Marks in this group

The lab hour is 24 marks — a quarter of the whole course, and it is the single largest item in it. It is easy to overlook, because it sits in a separate table from the twelve activity clusters.

Cluster 12 — the podcast (week 12, 6 marks)

12.1 (4) Each group prepares video content for a podcast on innovative technological interventions or research work tried out in the Kerala context, by academicians, professionals, government agencies, research institutions, private agencies, NGOs or other agencies.

The Kerala context is not decoration — it is the brief. A podcast on a technology developed in California does not meet it.

Subjects that fit, to show the range intended:

• Work by KSCSTE, CDAC Thiruvananthapuram, NIIST, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute or IIST
• Kerala Startup Mission-supported ventures
• K-FON, the state fibre optic network
• KSEB smart grid or solar initiatives
• Flood early-warning and disaster-response systems built after 2018
• Technology in Kudumbashree enterprises
• Waste management and biogas projects run by local bodies
• University research in your own college — often the easiest to get an interview for, and the most interesting

How to make it good rather than merely submitted:

1. Pick a subject you can talk to somebody about. An interview with the person who did the work is worth more than a summary of articles, and it is more achievable than it sounds — researchers generally agree to talk to students.
2. Research first. Read what exists; prepare specific questions.
3. Script an outline, not every word. Podcasts read from a script sound like it.
4. Record with decent audio. Audio quality matters more than video quality in this format. A quiet room and a phone held close beats a good camera in a corridor.
5. Edit. Free tools are adequate. Remove the dead air.
6. Agree roles — research, interview, recording, editing, upload.

12.2 (1) Upload to a podcasting platform or YouTube. Unlisted is usually acceptable if anyone in the group is uncomfortable with a public video; check with your teacher.

12.3 (1) Add the link to your LinkedIn profile, under Featured or as a post.

This is why cluster 6 came first. The three clusters chain together: you build a profile in week 1, network through it in week 3, and publish your own work on it in week 12. By the end of the semester there is something on your profile that you actually made — which is the point of the whole design.

The lab hour — 24 marks

Table 2 of the syllabus. Hands-on sessions on day-to-day engineering skills, plus a self-reflection report on the experience gained. The report is part of the deliverable, not an optional extra.

The listed skills:

1. Drilling with an electric hand drill
2. Cutting MS rod and flat with electric hand cutters
3. Filing, finishing and smoothening with electric hand grinders
4. Cutting MS rod with a hacksaw, work held in a bench vice
5. Handling measuring instruments
6. Welding MS and SS workpieces
7. Pipe bending — PVC and GI
8. Water tap fitting
9. Tap rubber seal (washer) changing
10. Union and valve connections in pipes
11. Foot valve fitting
12. Water pump seal and bearing changing

(MS = mild steel, SS = stainless steel, GI = galvanised iron.)

Half of these are plumbing, and that is deliberate. They are the household repairs an engineer is assumed to be able to do.

Safety — read before the first session

These are real tools. The safety rules exist because of specific injuries, so here is the reason attached to each.

Eye protection whenever anything is being cut, ground or drilled. Grinding and cutting throw hot metal particles at speed, and the eye does not blink fast enough. This is the rule that prevents the injuries that do not heal. Wear the goggles even for the short cut.

No loose clothing, no dangling sleeves, long hair tied back, and no gloves on a rotating drill. Gloves seem safer and are the opposite: a glove caught by a rotating bit pulls your hand in, whereas bare skin tends to slip free. Gloves are for handling sharp or hot stock, not for operating rotating machinery.

Clamp the work. Always. The commonest injury in a first workshop is a hand cut by a workpiece that spun when the drill bit bit through. A drill exerts far more torque than a hand can hold, particularly at breakthrough. If it is not in the vice, do not drill it.

Ear protection with grinders and cutters — hearing damage is cumulative and does not recover.

Check the tool before switching on. Cable intact, guard in place, grinding wheel undamaged, correct wheel for the material. A cracked grinding wheel can burst at speed, and that is the reason for the check.

Grinding wheel direction: sparks must go away from you and away from anyone else. Look before you start.

Welding: a proper welding shield, not sunglasses. The arc emits intense ultraviolet, and arc eye — a painful corneal burn — is usually felt hours later, which is why people do not realise at the time that they were damaging their sight. Cover exposed skin, ensure ventilation, keep flammables away, and never look at someone else's arc.

Hot metal looks exactly like cold metal. Assume anything cut, ground, drilled or welded is hot.

Report every injury, however minor, and know where the first aid box is. A metal splinter in the eye is not something to walk home with.

Doing the work well

Drilling. Mark and centre-punch first, or the bit wanders. Clamp the work. Start at low speed. Let the tool cut — pressing harder overheats the bit and hardens the surface. Ease off at breakthrough, which is where the bit grabs. Use cutting fluid on steel.

Hacksawing. Blade teeth point forward, away from the handle; fitted backwards, it will not cut and students routinely do this once. Cut on the forward stroke, ease on the return. Use the full length of the blade — short strokes wear one section and it breaks. Aim at about 50 strokes per minute; going faster does not cut faster, it just blunts the blade.

Filing. Push stroke only; lift on the return, since dragging back blunts the file. Keep it flat. Use a file card to clear pinned chips.

Grinding. Let the wheel do the work. Keep the workpiece moving to avoid a groove and to spread the heat. If the metal discolours it is overheating, which changes its properties as well as burning you.

Measuring instruments. Learn the vernier caliper and the micrometer properly — you will use both for the rest of your degree and career.

For a vernier, the reading is the main scale value plus the vernier division that coincides with a main scale line, times the least count:

Check the zero error before every measurement. An instrument that does not read zero when closed adds the same error to every reading you take, and an unrecorded zero error silently corrupts an entire set of results.

Pipe work. GI is threaded and joined with a union or coupling, sealed with PTFE tape wound in the direction of tightening so that screwing the joint together does not unwind it. PVC is solvent-cemented, or bent with heat — heat evenly and use a spring or sand fill inside to stop the wall collapsing at the bend.

Tap washer changing — the household job everyone should know:

1. Turn off the supply, and open the tap to drain it.
2. Remove the handle, then the headgear nut with a spanner.
3. Take out the spindle; the washer is at the bottom, held by a nut or a push fit.
4. Replace with the same size, reassemble, restore supply, check.

A dripping tap is almost always the washer. Water at the spindle rather than the spout is the gland packing, which is a different repair — knowing which is which is most of the skill.

Foot valve — the non-return valve at the bottom of a pump suction pipe, keeping the pipe primed so the pump does not run dry. A pump that loses prime overnight usually has a failed foot valve, and that one sentence will be useful to you at home for the rest of your life.

The self-reflection report

Required, and the marks depend on it. For each session: what you did, what went wrong, what you learned, and what you would do differently.

Write what actually happened. "The blade jammed twice before I realised I was using only the centre of it" is a better reflection than "the session was informative", and it is what the exercise is for.

The portfolio and the journal

Both are mandatory to pass. Not marks — a condition of passing.

Portfolio: every report and textual item you produced — the Gantt chart, personality test reflection, both role-storming exercises, mind map, empathy presentation, interview documentation, minutes, group report, action plan, TED talk summaries, forum screenshots, six hats output, problem-solving report, résumé, video links, EI and diversity work, interview and listening reflections, language work, and the lab self-reflection.

Journal: a running record — what you did, when, with whom, and what you took from it.

Two practical points.

Keep it digital and backed up, with a physical file if your department requires one. A single folder in cloud storage, one sub-folder per cluster, named by activity number. Losing the file in week 11 is a real and avoidable disaster.

File the same day. Twenty minutes a week; impossible in week 12.

And the reason to do it properly: it is carried forward to the Semester 7 Seminar, where you present it as experience-sharing across the HMC courses and the Mini Project. In three years you will open this file in front of people. Build one you would be willing to open.