Out of the 10 final teams, MSU won second place and was awarded a prize of $7,500 that was split among the team.

MSU’s six-member team designed a portable electrocardiograph, an essential health care tool used to monitor a person’s heart rate and identify irregularities in health.

The 2012-13 TI team included electrical engineering students Mike Mock, Xie He, Yuan Mei, Nate Kesto, Chaoli Ang and Justin Bohr. All of the team members were seniors last year and graduated this past spring.

Electrical and computer engineering professor Timothy Grotjohn said each semester, his senior seminar class usually has about 50 students in it.

Before the class begins, Grotjohn said he goes to various companies to ask if there are any projects students can work on. Typically, on the first day of lecture, Grotjohn hands out a list of the 10 projects for students to rank their top five project choices, and he assigns the different projects to a team, which ultimately created this year’s award-winning team.

“The students take the knowledge that they’ve developed in their course freshman through senior year, and they put it to application on a hands-on project where they have to come up with a solution,” Grotjohn said. “In this case, the project was suggested by Texas Instrument, and they gave kind of a specification to what they want to be accomplished.

“After that, the actual designs are all up to the students on how they create it.”

Mock said the whole purpose of their project was to create a demonstrative board that TI can take to a trade or technology show.

The final project was a portable board, displaying a heart signal scrolling across a small screen when they press their fingertips to the board, similar to those in doctor’s offices. After four months of working on the board, Mock said the team was very excited with the second-place finish.

“Getting second was pretty sweet,” Mock said. “There were 10 teams that got invited down to the finalist competition. A lot of teams entered it, and it was cool just being nomiated as a top-10 finalist. We were all super excited because we were just happy to be there.”

Team member Bohr didn’t have to travel far for the competition. Bohr started working for TI in June as an abattoir process applications engineer, after being hired full time from a previous summer internship with the company.

“At the beginning of last year, I already knew I’d be working for TI the next … summer,” Bohr said. “After my internship, I had the option to apply for full-time employment, and I got it, so when I came back for the school year, I asked to jump on the TI project.”