97 Senior Projects Displayed at Winter Design Review
March 2014 - Engineering students proudly showed off their senior design projects at the 2014 Winter Design Review in mid-March. More than 500 students were involved in 97 projects.
The students had been working on their projects for two quarters, and the Winter Design Review provided an opportunity for them to present their ideas to industry reviewers, as well as display and demonstrate the projects to a wider audience. About 45 industry representatives were on hand to review and give student teams feedback on their innovative ideas. Sixteen teams were selected for Dean’s Choice Awards (see below).
“Our goal is to make you the very best engineer that the UC system has to offer,” Dean Gregory Washington told the students during the lunch break. “We’re bringing in more technology and tools to continue to help you progress and move forward in your engineering career.”
About 20 teams from the freshman experiential learning course attended the Design Review to race their autonomous hovercrafts, some with more success than 
others. The freshman course, now in its second year, gives first-year students a hands-on engineering experience – to design, build and test a multidisciplinary project. The project is an autonomous hovercraft. It is designed with an Arduino microcontroller and multiple infrared sensors that track the walls of the racetrack. The winning team, named InsertNameHere, used two wood structure rudders to control the direction of the hovercraft through codes written from the microcontroller. At the end of the track, the hovercraft reached a black line and employed a light sensor to automatically deactivate the system. Students Benjeet Khabra, Qiwei Fu, David Poon, Wyza Nagui and Paige Cibart made up the winning team. Coming in second was Team Audastic Autonomer.
“This year’s teams learned a good lesson in time management. They were not all quite ready to race, but they all showed up to give it a try and were very enthusiastic,” said Brandon Tsuge, a teaching assistant who worked with the freshmen.
Dean’s Choice Awards
Biomedical Engineering
A Rapid, Low-Cost Diagnostic Tool for H. Pylori
Developing a Better Guidewire for Breast Biopsy
Closed Loop functional Electrical Stimulation: A Rehabilitation Device
Preventing Over-Insertion and Potential Injuries of Primary Trocars during Laparoscopy
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Multistory Building with Rooftop Patio
Bicycle Detection System
Water Treatment from Shale Gas Development
Pump Station
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Scoliosis Assessment System
Smart Weather Balloon Control System
Electric Vehicle Energy and Power Meter
Computer Interfaced Gauss-Meter
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Portable supercharger Strip Measurement and Refurbishing Tool
UCI Satellite
Racecar Engineering: Savage Blue
Rehab Robotics: Wheelchair-mounted Mechanical Arm for Opening Doors
For a full list of projects at the Winter Design Review, see winterdesignreview.eng.uci.edu
