Dayton Engineer

By Cara Stevens, marketing communications intern

Despite being away from campus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, senior engineering students Nathan Brown, Kyle Mulcrone, Joseph Vicario and Matthew Vild were able to complete their senior design project with Brixiliated via Zoom video call and overcome the challenges of remote learning to meet their client’s needs.

Brixilated, started by UD alum Adam Mullins, provides large mosaic Lego puzzles to companies for team building events. Brixilated takes an image, pixilates it in a photo software program, builds the photo digitally using Legos, and then physically builds an image with actual Lego pieces or packages 8x8 squares into build kits with instructions to build mosaics. 

University of Dayton alum Adam Mullins first came up with the idea for Brixilated while he was a student at UD in the GEMnasium program, which combines academic disciplines to create innovative deliverables that intertwine majors and ideas. 

The connection between the senior design project and Brixilated came from the GEMnasium, where Brown, an IACT [Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation] student met Mullins. Mullins was stuck trying to find a new way to hang the mosaics, and Brown was in search of an interesting senior capstone project. After approval from the School of Engineering's Innovation Center, Brown and the team set out to create a frame for the mosaics. 

“The core of IACT is multidisciplinary learning. I saw the problem that the mosaics needed a way to hang and it became a ‘help me help you’ situation with Adam and trying to make this a senior design capstone,” said Brown. “Our team also engaged in collisions in the Gemnasium where students of differing studies and disciplines were able to provide feedback and critique through their unique lenses that we could then incorporate in future iterations of the design.”

Brixilated Director of Community Engagement Jacquelyn Strey said the partnership with UD has been great.

"We've been so lucky to get well integrated in many different ways in a really short amount of time. Being new to the Dayton area and UD, I can only attribute this to UD's welcoming culture and the faculty and staff's generosity with their time, skills and resources," she said. "We're so proud of the work the students have done and we've really had an amazing experience being a part of this process. 

Custom lego kits are available via the University of Dayton bookstore by visiting our website.