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Columns::April 21, 2003
Honors and Awards
UGA’s top students and teachers recognized at Honors Day ceremony
University hosts state championship for future problem solvers
The greening of South Campus
Flower(ing) power: UGA scientists plot key events in plant evolution
Office of Research Services appoints a new director
Education dean receives diversity award from housing residents
Lifelong interest in animals leads prof to career as wildlife biologist
Retirees
Kudos
Forum essay: International education
Making a scene
Across the board
Campus News
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| Seniors Jeff Lepis (from left), Kristina West and Billy Fletcher developed this prosthetic hand as their project in the engineering design class. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
On-the-job training
Engineers team up with businesses for new designs
By Alan Flurry
aflurry@engr.uga.edu
Does classroom activity at UGA have an economic impact on the state of Georgia? This spring, a committee chaired by Faculty of Engineering director Dale Threadgill distributed a survey around campus to determine just that. What may have surprised some was news from Threadgill’s own department, biological and agricultural engineering, that undergraduates there were involved directly with companies in and around the state to perfect and refine products already on the market.
The program is part of the course for senior design students in engineering (ENGR 4920), a large class broken up into several sections mentored by different faculty members. The projects are selected by a design committee of engineering faculty who compile a list of potential design problems after consultations with private companies in several industries.
One of this past year’s standouts was a new design for a stand for a Makita table saw. Previously, Makita had offered six different stands, but the company wanted to reduce that to a single stand, cutting down substantially on production costs but also responding to consumer feedback about refinements. Working with the design generated and prototyped by seniors from UGA engineering, Makita put their new definitive design into production this spring.
“The majority of projects give the industry the first iteration of what the particular design will look like,” says Tim Foutz, professor and undergraduate coordinator for biological and agricultural engineering.
Once the design committee has compiled a list of potential projects for spring semester, the students make selections of ordered preference among the projects, indicating their rationale for each choice. Students must assess their own qualifications and see themselves as an integral part of a team on which their grade hinges. As future engineers, they begin to understand the importance of being able to work with others and translate varied expertise into a successful outcome. Assignments are made by the design committee based on students’ assessments, as well as past student performance and major to ensure that the necessary expertise is present for each project.
“The project mimics the first entry-level job our students usually take,” says Foutz. “We don’t teach a class on how to complete the project, so there’s a great degree of self-learning involved.”
This year’s design projects include a cost-effective and functional prosthetic hand, a bicycle crossing at the Oconee River on College Station Road and a hand tool for safely detecting anti-personnel mines. These projects combine the challenges of multidisciplinary engineering with the urgency of real-world problem solving, confronting the students with an intense final semester.
Luciano Bordoni, a senior from Atlanta, sees in the design projects an application of the overall goal of engineering: making something better and making it cheaper.
“We’re doing a lot of cost analysis, trying to look at the manufacturing-feasibility side of it,” he says. “Can we actually build this thing, and is it going to be more economical than the existing product?”
Bordoni’s group is redesigning a mower attachment for a compact tractor made by John Deere. Design constraints given to the team make this project particularly challenging because the new element must work with an existing product, limiting the potential solutions. The team has been working closely with Mark Evans, a senior engineer from John Deere Commercial Products in Augusta.
“We hope to see some ideas that we can put into production,” Evans says. “Attention to customer needs and wants is a key driver of new designs. We have seen that engineering graduates from UGA are well-prepared in that regard.”
In other words, the company can draw on the enthusiasm and hard work of the student engineers while the students have an opportunity to work on significant design problems and enter the work force better prepared. Overcoming the difficulties and limitations of existing designs brings companies back to the classroom looking for fresh ideas; by loaning equipment and design dilemmas to undergraduates, they give students a rare opportunity to transcend the classroom and gain valuable experience.
Smaller companies may look to the students for real innovation and product improvement. A company like John Deere may be more interested in considering long-term benefits of designs, or even in finding new employees. The situations are always different. But for students the one constant is overcoming misconceptions about the working world.
“As engineers we presume most of the challenges will be technical,” says K.C. Das, the faculty member who served as mentor to the John Deere team. “But in a real-world scenario you quickly discover that the management, marketing and personnel decisions also require great flexibility and skill.” |
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