Engineering solutions: Engineering students advance to national competition for second year in a row
For the second year in a row, engineering students competed – and performed well – at the annual Atlantic Engineering Competition, which, this year, was hosted by the University of New Brunswick.
Fourth-year electrical engineering student Katy Warren and fourth-year mechanical engineering student Peter Snow won first place in the re-engineering category. This secures them a place to compete in the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) in March, which will be hosted by McGill University.
“We had a lot of fun and worked really hard,” said Ms. Warren. “The winners were announced at a banquet on the last night, and that was really exciting because we weren't allowed to watch the other teams present so we had no idea how we had placed. We were really impressed by how different everybody's solutions were, and it was a big surprise when we learned we had won.”
The competition is divided into seven categories – communications; senior design; junior design; debate; consulting; innovative design; and re-engineering.
For the re-engineering category, students apply an engineering process to an existing device or system to add new functionality or to enhance its original function.
For this year’s competition, competitors were tasked with two challenges.
In the first challenge students were given one week before the competition to come up with a way to make an incandescent light bulb more efficient by adding some secondary function to reduce waste. The second challenge, which was given on the first day of the competition, was to pretend they were stranded in the woods with only a drip coffee machine and then use as many parts of it as possible to make a water purification system. Competitors then had eight hours to submit presentations and reports for both cases.
Ms. Warren and Mr. Snow are very excited to represent Memorial at the national competition in Montreal.
“We are really looking forward to the experience of the competition,” said Mr. Snow. “It should be a great challenge for both of us. We both had a great time at the AEC, and can't wait to see what this next competition brings.”
“Congratulations to Ms. Warren and Mr. Snow and we wish them all the best at CEC,” said Dr. Greg Naterer, dean, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. “Our students are consistently performing well at regional, national and international competitions and we are very proud of them.”
Memorial students also competed in the senior and junior design categories.