From a year to one semester seniors’ in the College of Engineering create projects for industrial partners, showcasing them in the annual Engineering Design Expo.
The senior engineering capstone students will showcase their designs in the Engineering Design Expo from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Friday in the Bruce Pitman Center, which is free and open to the public.
The capstone class is designed for seniors to create a project based on the needs of industrial partners. With eight degree programs within the College of Engineering, all of the programs participate in the expo.
John Crepeau, the College of Engineering associate dean of undergraduate students, is organizing this event for the first time this year as the chairmen of the organizing committee.
John Crepeau | Courtesy
“The power of the capstone program is that the students work with industrial partners because they are their clients,” Crepeau said. “They meet with professional engineers every week or every two weeks to talk about their design.”
Industrial partners present the projects that would ultimately solve real-world problems to the class and are assigned topics and groups to work with.
This year there will be more interactive presentations of the work as well as a wider range of presentations as high school students are able to present — causing the expo to grow substantially.
“It’s really great for the elementary students, middle school and high school students to see the projects they could be working on when they come to college,”Crepeau said. “They see that they won’t just be sitting in the class listening to a professor drone on about something — they actually get to use their creative juices to design something and test it to see if it works.”
The class was recognized in 2012 by the National Academy of Engineers for its incorporation of real world experiences.
“They are solving actual engineering problems for industrial partners,” Crepeau said. “Last year we had a group of students worked on a project for Boeing in their manufacturing line and they created a device that saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.”
What students are able to take away from the expo, is the ability to explain their projects to a wide variety of people such as the judges who have studied engineering for years and young children who have a harder time understanding the complex principles.
“It’s important for engineering to be able to explain concepts of engineering in a way that anyone can understand,” Crepeau said. “It’s very important for engineers to explain what they do because we are a very technologically advanced society and there are some people who can understand these concepts and some who can’t.”
Nicole Hindberg can be reached at [email protected]