FlatSat workshops teaching fundamental electronics skills for CubeSat building

The University of Nottingham (UoN) recently established its own CubeSat programme, with the team commencing design, construction and testing of the first CubeSats in late 2020. However, one major challenge encountered was a common lack of practical applied electronics skills amongst students. This was repeatedly noted by students as a major obstacle to project success in progress reviews for WormSail, our first CubeSat project. Notably, these sorts of skills are also an area of common concern for young workers and employers in the UK Space Sector. This skill gap existed despite the student team coming from a variety of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) undergraduate backgrounds, including physics, computer science, and aerospace and mechanical engineering. With insufficient time to recruit students with electronic engineering backgrounds, it proved difficult to find "all-rounders" to join the team with the broad range of skills required for the project. One advantage that several students had however was their experience from informal hobbies involving Arduino and Raspberry Pi (RPi) based microcontroller electronics. These were found to endow highly transferrable skills, with these members providing significant contributions to the team through their skills and teaching. Team members found these so useful, that the “FlatSat” programme was set up to provide electronics teaching resources for new members of the CubeSat team. Sessions within the programme could be planned and delivered by the experienced team members, and hence be targeted to include applicable, referrable, and important skills and knowledge for building CubeSats. Through developing these resources, the team realised it may be beneficial to include this programme in taught modules offered in the Faculty of Engineering, to enhance practical skills for all students enrolled in these modules. This paper is intended to overview the work carried out in developing the FlatSat teaching workshop, and highlight the resources and their benefits to groups including other higher education space module conveners, developing CubeSat teams, School and further education teachers, STEM Outreach Coordinators, and general hobbyists. It is hoped that boosting confidence with such in-demand skills will be of great benefit to learners. We will also review case studies of the first large-scale workshop sessions and outline plans for future developments, particularly taking into consideration the feedback of demonstrators, students, and observers to the workshop.