Alumni and Friends Making an Impact

Engineering competitions aren’t in short supply, and they offer incredible opportunities for students to work across disciplines in “real-life” situations. But often the biggest challenge they face is funding.

What’s so expensive? Kim Bigelow, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and interim associate dean for academics and student success, indicates a problem that even a nonengineer can recognize.

“Students have to go; they have to test their design; they have to know what fell apart, and what didn’t work; how that team from another school did so well; and then they’re ready to improve and move onto their next iteration,” Bigelow said. “If you’re making a new car, boat or whatever it is every year or two, you can just imagine the costs associated with that.”

The teams travel anywhere from 30 minutes away to 30 hours away as the UD Mars Rover team did when they hauled their design from Dayton to Drumheller, Canada. Expenses continue to add up with tools and equipment, usually beyond what’s available in a lab or UD’s Makerspace.

Even with all of those expenses, the value far outweighs the costs.

So, in 2023, the School of Engineering’s Dean’s Office created the Accelerating Curriculum Transformation grant to support interdisciplinary initiatives, led by Bigelow and Brian Rigling, professor of electrical and computer engineering.

One of the grant recipients in 2024 was the Engineering Club Student Council, a student-led organization for all of the engineering design competition teams at UD. Cory Howley, a UD senior and a member of the UD solar-powered boat design competition team, Solar Splash, submitted the proposal on behalf of nine design teams to get the resources they needed to create and build their prototype and attend competitions.

“I think these design competitions the engineering students do is the best direct experiential learning opportunity that we have,” Rigling said. “The students are not working under somebody who is the ‘real’ engineer — they are the engineers and technicians; they’re the ones putting these things together.

“It also has good entrepreneurial aspects to it in that the competition is acting like a customer looking for a solution to something, and then the teams self-organize and figure out their solution, and the best one wins.”

And just as the design teams find success by working together, they also are staying afloat because of how One Day, One Dayton donors give together. Their funding supported the ACT grant and the Dean’s Fund for Excellence, which is matching donated gifts to the design teams.

Because of this support, UD students are experiencing the transformation from student to engineer.

“Doing a student engineering design competition allows for us as students to do hands-on learning and apply concepts from class in a completely different scenario that challenges us to use skills we may not have had to use otherwise,” Howley said of their experience through Solar Splash. “It’s a lot more reflective of what real-life engineering is and prepares us for that while we’re still in college.”

Specifically, Howley noted they have learned how to communicate with people of various expertise, teach themselves concepts on the fly, deal with failure, and work with ambiguous goals and define them on their own.

“There’s not an expert immediately available to turn to when designing and building, so we’ve made mistakes,” they said. “But you learn from it, and that’s very empowering.”