Design Engineering Competitions

Avnet Tech Games Give Product Ideas a Chance in the Real World

This week Avnet announced the winners from its third annual Avnet Tech Games, an annual competition featuring several multi-disciplinary technology events.

The competition, held April 5, presented more than 150 students from colleges and universities in Arizona with several technology challenges. Among the Avnet Tech Games events are "AMD Build the Fastest Computer," where teams use pre-selected and ordered parts to build the fastest computer and "Design and Build a Digital Device," where students present a technical report on a digital electronic device they designed and built.

The competition has students work both in teams and on their own for the nine events to prepare them for what we all know is a competitive engineering job market. A networking opportunity and career fair at the event also served to connect students with possible future employers.

The winners of the events, which are judged by sponsor representatives, local technology firms, engineers and technical "experts," received $1,000 scholarships. And the competition takes it a step further by giving two teams in the "Invent a Technical Product" event a chance to meet with Arizona Business Accelerator to discuss further development of their product ideas. This sees a technology or innovation developed in a competition like the Avnet Tech Games through to possible production. Do you know of any other events that give teams this kind of real-world possibility?

FTF 2008 Drives Sustainable Engineering

The Freescale Technology Forum is a little greener this year. Each forum in 2008 has a design challenge accompanying it — and the finalists’ prototypes, due May 16, will all be products that can benefit the environment.

Green design is an aspect of engineering possibly best fostered through competition. Driven by the importance of sustainability in future tools and technologies, competitions like the FTF challenge will in large part develop the sustainable systems we’ll rely on in the future. And each finalist announced seems, at least to me, promising — the list includes a flexible fuel engine control unit, a gas-saving automobile solution injection system, a clean water diverter and a sun light efficiency detector. It will be interesting to see how these technologies stack up against each other in a competition. Forum attendees will vote on the winning prototype, where I assume the major comparison point will be how beneficial each technology is to the environment. What sustainable engineering technologies do you think could have the most positive impact on the environment?

Young Construction Workers Compete at CONEXPO

This year’s CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2008 (check out DN Contributing Editor Joe Ogando’s coverage on dozer innovations from Caterpillar and Deere) was host to the finals of the International Construction Challenge put on by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM). The three challenges of the competition focused on the construction industry’s positive impact on safe roads, clean water and other quality-of-life issues.

The AEM says the challenge helps recruit construction’s future workforce to address an impending shortage of future skilled workers needed to fill over 1 million new jobs in construction by 2012. This is in line with an obvious major goal of most engineering competitions - to start cultivating young engineers. The International Construction Challenge brings together high school teams from across the United States and Canada to learn more about construction careers, infrastructure, construction equipment and how to work as part of a team.

The competition’s three challenges were Infrastructure Dialogue, where teams researched issues including drinking water systems, road and highway systems and bridges; equipment and careers, where teams developed an interactive educational tool to teach about construction careers and equipment, and Road Warrior, where teams build equipment devices and then compete to move the most gravel using the equipment. The first-place team from Perry Public Schools, Perry, OK, impressed the judges during the Road Warrior challenge. Each team member won a $2,000 scholarship and a computer.