(Dec. 18, 2008) In their final year of engineering curriculum, students at the UC Denver College of Engineering and Applied Science take a Senior Design class. In their final week, they show off their work at the Engineering Student Design Open House.

 Thanks to a fund donated by Donald and Karen White, the top two design projects are awarded with cash prizes. Also, a team of judges from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) recognized a top project from each participating department.

This semester, the winners were students Donald Ashby and Dave Crowl, whose project “Wireless Power Transfer.”

This class gives the student a major design experience that culminates all knowledge and skills they have learned up to this point. It is the first time in the curriculum that engineering students formally learn about such things as solving a problem for someone else, design tradeoffs, cost and budgeting, documentation of process and product, scheduling tasks with lead time, and to experience all sorts of human factors involved in teamwork. For many engineering students, this is the most exciting class they take and it comes closest to preparing them for the real world that awaits them.

Photo: AVC Jim Hageman speaks with electrical engineering student Katy O’Leary of the “Mr. Squid” Low-noise Electronics Box team. Mr. SQUID is a complete Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometer system based on high-temperature superconductor technology (HTS). The project received Honorable Mention.