Design challenge part of classwork for undergrads

Henry Baumgartner
ASME NEWS

The Student Design Competition has, almost since its inception, been used by different professors as part of their coursework, according to Charles Hurst, a former professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech and the longtime chair of the ASME committee that oversees the event.

In fact, the design competition is used in schools from Texas to Singapore to teach engineering students the principles of design (see "Singapore makes Student Design Competition part of coursework" in last month's ASME News).

The SDC is an annual event sponsored by ASME in which a single problem is announced each year, requiring teams of college students to design and construct a device to fulfill some particular task. This year, for instance, contestants were required to devise a "sip-and-puff" fishing rod that would enable a quadriplegic fisherman to control a fishing rod.

Colleges from across the country and around the world send their top finishers to competitions in each region of ASME. The top finisher from each region goes to the finals, held at ASME's annual International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

A case in point is Roger Gonzalez's course in dynamics at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. Gonzalez, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and the school's ASME faculty advisor, has been using the competition in his course for four years. The course, which is required of all mechanical engineering majors, is generally taken by sophomores. The competition is part of the course for those who take it in the fall, and optional for those who take the course in the spring.

When Gonzalez started using the SDC problems in his course, it was only as a class exercise, with no one competing in the regional contest. But it seemed to Gonzalez that the best of these students' designs would have won if they had entered the formal competition, so the next year he sent his top teams to the Region X competition. He may have had something there — his students won the regionals their first year and, in fact, have won three years in a row. At this year's regionals in Tulsa, a team from LeTourneau won once again, and Steve Nelson, Peter Thiessen, Ryan Van Tol and Mathew Vernon will be competing in the finals in the fall at the Congress in New York.

According to Gonzalez, many colleges use the SDC for their students' senior project, but he feels it is more appropriate at the sophomore level. In the past, he sent no more than three teams on to the regionals, but recently he has relented on this because "there were so many good teams." But "if I don't think their machine performs to a reasonably high standard, they don't go." He added, "I think it is a good experience to work on a project where a bunch of students throughout the country all have the same limitations and design goals."

In his Mechanical Engineering Design course at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Lovonia Theriot works SDC into coursework taken mainly by sophomores.

He assigns it as an out-of-class project for three-person teams early in the semester; then they have a competition, and the top one or two teams go to the regionals. Theriot has been using the SDC ever since the competition started, and his teams have won the regionals twice.

As Gonzalez pointed out, "A lot of it is the expectations of the faculty member. Set the goal high enough, and some students will rise to the occasion."

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