Design Engineering Contest

This course allows students to experience the day-to-day reality of engineering design; team work, deal with competition, scarce recourses and limited time. During this course students (in groups of max. 5) will design and build a robot that has to perform what seems to be a simple task. Every group will start from an identical toolkit containing electric motors, gearboxes and a variety of mechanical parts. An exciting competition will determine who can solve the task best while dealing with the competition at the same time. And, just as in the real world, anything could happen during the runtime of the course. Building the robot and the contest however does not fully determine the result of the course; 40% of your mark is determined by your personal reflection on team work!

Besides the subject of team work, learning objectives of this course include adaptation skills, practical electronics and prototyping during a design-build-test cycle. Students will build upon team working skills, by reviewing their team performance using the 7C model (Janssen, 1999). The two deliverables of the course are a report on the robots performance and potential redesign and an individual journal in which students reflect on their role as a team member.