Ruth Castro,13, points out what needs to be done to program the robot (on the left) to manuever through a maze pictured below to her friend Imman Suleiman, 13. Both are middle schoolers at Riverside in Grand Rapids attending the Design Days at the MSU Union for a class fieldtrip. Retired MSU mechanical engineer, Bob Watson, said that this program gives kids the opportunity to work with programming which they probably don’t get in their schools.
Engineering seniors spent countless hours in the Engineering Building this week perfecting their final projects in preparation for Design Days, an event electrical engineering senior Nick Tram said is a chance “to show off” today.
Throughout the semester, students have worked on projects sponsored by groups such as NASA, Chrysler and the Air Force Research Lab.
Students presented their final creations at Design Days, held Thursday and Friday in the Union, to an audience of representatives of all the groups that have sponsored the semester’s projects.
Students created booths with posters and brochures for middle and high school students to show them the world of engineering.
Tram is part of a five-person team working on a solar-powered laptop computer that would be able to retrieve an Internet connection via satellite.
The project is sponsored by Lenovo, a Chinese company that is one of the largest producers of personal computers in the world.
When complete, members of the team will travel to Tanzania where they will work on integrating the technology into the classroom, Tram said.
“Hopefully, it works so some poor kids will get use out of it,” said Almir Mujkic, an electrical engineering senior and a member of the Lenovo team. “That’s our main goal — to have a working product.”
Many of the students hoped that their projects came together in time.
Electrical engineering senior Kyle Swartz worked on a project sponsored by Bosch Automotive to create an electrostatic discharge gun. The 5000-volt discharge gun is meant to simulate the charge typically created when people shuffle their feet across carpet and create sparks. Those sparks, Swartz said, can be powerful enough to fry small computer chips inside important electronics in cars.
But the team faced a setback when the gun’s power source failed the night before their first presentation to Bosch representatives.
“We were up until 2 a.m. working on it, but it ending up working so the sponsors were happy,” Swartz said.
Electrical engineering senior Sean Hatch, Swartz’s teammate, said managing time became important.
“We’ve been here the past five days for about 12 hours a day,” said Hatch. “You can’t test one part of the project until you test the others.”
Erik Goodman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and member of the Design Days faculty, said companies are drawn to sponsoring these projects because it provides them with fresh insight and potential future employees.
“(These companies) get the chance to have good engineers look at an idea without spending a lot of money,” Goodman said. “Plus, they get to look at the students and see if they want to hire them after the project is completed.”
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