Special Topics in Sports Engineering is an inter-university course for Master students in Mechanical Engineering, Movement Sciences, Sport Sciences, and other related MSc programs. The course is organized as a two-week intensive course and comprises lectures, demonstrations, practicals, hands-on research, and a final field test. The course will be taught by staff from A4SEE partner universities.

The course is organised around the ongoing theme of: "Maximizing cycling performance".

In this course, students will have to answer the question:

Given a particular bike, what will be your own predicted time over a given distance and track and how well does this match reality?

The prediction should be based on a power-based simulation model of cycling and the relevant bicycle and rider dependent parameters, which have to be collected experimentally. The bike can be chosen freely and might be a top-end racing bike or your grandmother's shopping bike.

Study Goals

After following this course, students should understand the complexity of maximizing sports performance and the importance of including material–athlete interaction. More specifically, students should be:

Familiar with the Power Equation concept and able to apply this to cycling.
Have knowledge of methodological aspects of sports research, in particular error propagation, man–machine interaction (closed loop complexity), measurement techniques, internal and external validity.
Have insight into the organizational and psychological complexities of sports innovation.
Able to measure key parameters needed for power equations, related to their own field and have experience in the measurement of key parameters in adjacent fields.
Able to provide a cycling performance simulation program with the parameters necessary to evaluate performance on a realistic level.
Able to collect and present data on parameters for such a simulation program to fellow group members.
Present research findings through an individual portfolio, and a group presentation/poster/brief oral.