Focus: A forum for Engineering students and teachers, on June 7

The next group of tech moguls may be training right now at Columbus State.

A group of Electronic Engineering Technologies students took on a real-world challenge in May 2006 as part of their Capstone project. Many majors require students to do a Capstone project, a quarter-long project that brings together all the skills they’ve learned over two years.

The five-man group was challenged by Prof. Joe Bowman to create a system to control a security camera wirelessly from a handheld computer such as a PDA.

The capstone project group included Jason Cochran, Sean Haney, Zinsou Messan, Austin Rampensad and Alex Tillman. The domelike camera sat on the table during the presentation, streaming their performance wirelessly to a nearby laptop computer.

The students started by developing a specification document, and then researched what equipment was available. The system could be used to monitor highway traffic, watch over convenience stores, or examine manufacturing processes, Tillman said. In addition to their real-world project, the team faced a number of real-world hurdles such as supplier errors and software incompatibility.

The students took several routes to get to their major in Electronic Engineering. Messan came to Ohio from West Africa.

“Once I got here, my first intention was to go to college,” he said. “They make you take a lot of classes, but they pay off.”

A group of Electrical Engineering students demonstrated a voice-activated robot in June 2007. The robot was designed to hear a command, then take a user to a destination. The students said such a thing could be used in a supermarket to direct shoppers to items.

The students named the robot TAS, or Tell And Show.

The group included Daniel Bunyard, Jonathan Swies, Jay Lund, Jeffrey Curran and Joshua Moore.

 

 

Real-world activities are a hallmark of the Engineering Technologies program. Here, another group of students makes bridges out of straight pins and drinking straws for Mech 242 - Strength of Materials.

They test each bridge by suspending a bucket of sand from the span. Through the activity, students learn aspects of structural analysis including tension, compression, buckling, & torsion.