BU College of Engineering Magazine
Spring 2004
Rite of Passage
ENG senior capstone presentations build real-world confidence.
By Tim Stoddard
Seeing that interaction can be transformative for parents in the audience as well. In many ways, the senior project shows them how far their sons and daughters have come at Boston University. “It’s one thing to go to graduation and watch your kid wear a nice gown and march with 5,000 other kids,” says Lutchen. “It’s another thing to watch him or her stand up in front of a lot of scientists and engineers and blow away the audience with what they did during their senior project. That to me would be one of the proudest moments as a parent.”
ENG Designed
When William Oliver, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), heard that a friend was having trouble with crows ransacking his garden, he solicited help from undergraduates in his department. Oliver added “crows” to a list of other problems compiled by ENG faculty and alumni. Every year, ECE seniors form teams and select their design project from this list. Two groups wanted to have at the crows, and now they’re competing with slightly different versions of a mechanical scarecrow. One is using infrared sensors that detect the motion of the crows and activate an ultrasonic whistle to shoo the birds away. The other is working on a scarecrow that tracks the crows with a video camera and shoots jets of water at them.
Other ECE teams are designing such things as an online trip planner like Mapquest for navigating Boston on the MBTA, a digital display board for flashing messages from your car window while it is parked (it’s illegal to do this from a moving vehicle), and a device that tracks the real-time position of sailboats in a race. Each of the projects requires the students to call upon their technical knowledge from BU courses, says Michael Ruane, an ECE associate professor, but also to adapt to the evolving technologies in the market. “In their courses, the students are encouraged to work independently and to work from first principles,” he says, “and that’s usually not the way to pursue rapid development on the schedules the real world needs. They need to learn where to apply their creativity most effectively. If you’re reinventing many wheels within wheels, you’ll miss your deadline, you’ll miss your market, and you’ll miss your paycheck.”
Open sesame
Theodore Morse hasn’t had any crow problems lately, but about a year ago he was having trouble opening a jar. When the lid wouldn’t budge, Morse, an ECE professor, suggested that his colleagues in the department of aerospace and mechanical engineering (AME) put some seniors on the case. As in ECE, AME seniors form teams at the beginning of the fall semester and select their project from a list provided by the faculty. The students who took on the jar assignment quickly realized that there were many jar openers already on the market, but there were few affordable, nonmotorized versions to choose from.
“These types of projects give students experience in coming to grips with defining what the problem really is,” says Morton Isaacson, an AME associate professor and associate chairman of undergraduate studies. “With the jar opener, the team first decided whether it would have a motor or not. Then they raised the issue of who their customer would be. Ultimately they settled on a market niche of people with physical impairments like arthritis.”
For Jill Anderson and her teammates, the most challenging part of the jar-opening project has been shifting from an independent working style into a collaborative one. “We’re very attached to our own concepts, and so the teamwork—getting us all together on the same page and the same schedule with the same vision—has definitely been the most challenging part,” she says. “We had four different jar openers when we started, but if you look at our sketches in our design journals, you’ll see pieces of each of our ideas in the final design.”
It’s a bird, it’s a plane. . .
Seniors working on aerospace engineering projects rarely have clients come to them with crow or jar problems. Instead, they review the trade literature or consult sources in industry to keep abreast of hot topics that would make for a timely mission. Then they get together in teams to design a vehicle to carry out that mission, first drafting designs on paper and ultimately building a model.
Back to top
|
 |
 |
