Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

What a whirlwind it has been at EIT over the last week! There was plenty of excitement with the official opening of our new $8 million Trades and Technology Training Complex with the Right Honourable Prime Minister John Key on Friday.

Then we had well over a thousand people come through the campus on Sunday to have a look at what we do and how we do it across the whole EIT campus!

The growing interest in trades and technology programmes and a different mode of teaching triggered our decision to develop a greenfields site at the western end of the campus for the Trades Complex.

The flexible open-plan layout of workshops is used for teaching carpentry, panel beating, automotive work, gas welding, machining and fabrication.

Real-world trades training methods are used so that carpentry students, for example, learn all the stages of construction by building small houses on site.

These cottages can be worked on under cover or wheeled outdoors to a secure yard that forms part of the complex.

It was EIT’s carpentry programmes that spearheaded the institute’s move to project based learning several years ago. This highly successful teaching method has since been extended to the institute’s other trades and technology programmes.