Tinkering.
After the Alchemics class, Jez parted ways with his lab partners and agreed that they would meet up to get lunch together. Jez had to quickly run back to the central part of the campus to find the tinkering shop, there were only 5 or so people in the classroom when he stepped in. The other students seemed to keep to themselves. The center of the classroom stood a rather short man with rather long white hair and a set of eyeglasses that had been modified with a set of different magnifications on it. On the cluttered desk at the center of the hall laid a bent bronze plaque with the name "Nilus Corbin" on it. Once Jez sat into a chair, the teacher decided it was time to start the lesson.
"Mechanics is the use of machinery to reach goals, tinkering is the use of magic to augmented and reinforce machines."
Mr. Corbin finished the introduction, as he hit a switch, the sound of metal gears grinding against each other could be heard and a seam in the floor split as a chalkboard rose up from the floor. On it could be seen rows and rows of gears and runes showed on the sides of it. Mr. Corbin then proceeded to write a string of symbols that made no sense to the students.
"These are the basics in rune works that are used to power tinkers."
After this, the teacher hit a button on the side of the chalkboard. Half of the chalkboard slid back into the floor taking some of the glyphs down with it, the remaining piece of chalkboard split apart, operating the glyphs and the negative space that was made got replaced by clean pieces of board. Professor Corbin then proceeded to walk to one of the glyphs and write a name under it, before proceeding to explain to the class what each of the glyphs that were remaining did. Some members of the audience started to lose interest in the lecture at this point.
After thirty or so minutes the professor had finished his conjectures and turned to address the audience, "So that was the theoretical explanation, time to put it into practice" he stated before walking over to his desk and flipping a switch, The entire room shuddered. The desks of the auditorium started to split and open, inside was a plate of some kind of silver metal, a handful of copper pellets and a furnace of some sort. "you all should have a set of basic jeweler's tools, your goal is to make a simple motor out of any of the materials in front of or on you."
'Simple', checked Jake in Jez's head, 'follow my instructions.', he commented. Jez picked up a scoring pen and started to etch the rough outline of a set of glyphs, specifically three sets of glyphs nested inside of each other, the basis of glyphs is to spell out what what you want the formation to do by using the glyphs that have the desired properties, the accuracy of the glyphs and how punctual the crafter is determines both the speed and efficiency of the formation. Jez had carved the glyphs for "transfer", "mana", and "store", once together, however, the three glyphs started to grow hot and faintly glow. This was the mark that a formation was growing unstable this occurred when glyphs are placed together without anything that is there to keep the formation together or stable. Quickly, Jez rapidly carved the glyph "contain", "vent" and "port" on the outside of the storage formation stabilizing it. This was all done on a piece of stone, as this was a decently stable formation, Jez figured he could skimp out on materials for building it, he then picked up the metal plate and started to inscribe more glyphs, starting on the outside with "contain", "control" and "reinforce", before moving to the center of the formation and inscribing the words "focus" and "transfer", then using his metal magic, he forms a sphere at the very center of the formation with an opening on the top. The entire sphere was then inscribed with the glyph of "release" and "reinforce". Jez then picked up the metal plate and set onto the stone slab, this released a clicking noise, the boiler was complete with the addition of a port on the top of the sphere with both a thin output tube and addition funnel. Jez then proceeded to pick up 8 tiny ceramic balls and using metal magic again formed a thin ring of copper before sinking the ceramic balls into it and then placing the entire setup into a steel casing to form a ball bearing. All of this had been noticed by Profesor Corbin, who hid a smile under his mustache. Jez then proceeds to sink the ball bearing into a basic a snail-shaped casing adding a shaft to the newly formed mini turbine, before attaching the input to the boiler. Alas, the steam turbine is created.
After some time passes the rest of the students present the Profesor with what they have, most of the students had given up but three had something to present, a sterling engine, a hero engine, and Jez's steam turbine. The slowest of the group was the sterling engine using the heat differential of the student's hand, the second faster was the hero engine using the steam produced by the flames of fire magic. The finale presentation was Jez's steam turbine, the device was placed on a charging formation and fire mana was injected into it, as the mana increased, iconic noise of a turbine could be heard increasing in pitch as the blades continued to speed up and cut the input stream up faster.
Even father it was removed from the charging formation it still accelerated because of the mana battery on the stone slab. This performance managed to earn a round of applause from the professor.