If you go
College of Technology and Innovation student project exposition
Thursday, May 7 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Union Cooley Ballroom B, ASU Polytechnic campus
The event is free.
Engineering technology and engineering students will get a chance to show off their contributions to science on Wednesday at the Polytechnic campus.
Their senior capstone projects are yearlong efforts made by groups of students, said Jerry Gintz, a senior lecturer at the College of Technology and Innovation and chair of the projects.
He said the purpose of the project is to prepare students for the real world, as this is the last project to complete before graduation.
“The goal is to allow students to follow their dreams,” Gintz said. “That’s the beauty of this — to try to emulate what the students will see in their careers.”
He said there are a variety of sponsors, individuals and corporations, who support the projects. Students are able to choose which project they would like to work on, he said.
“We put quite a few projects out there, but we allow the students to select the project that is most applicable [to their area of study],” Gintz said, with the only constraint being students must work on teams, not individually.
A project sponsor, Dwight Schaffer, said he has been working with students on an automated robotic therapy system for multiple-sclerosis patients. As a certified manual therapist, Schaffer said he relieves pain from patients with his hands, which is what he said the robotic system would do.
“It’s a device to benefit people who are in rehabilitation and who are not ambulatory,” Schaffer said. “This device will do a lot of what I do by my hands.”
He said once the prototype is complete, he will work to find a manufacturer so the device can be used in physical therapy stations everywhere.
A student working on the project, Alvina Lee, said working with a group of five classmates was a learning experience in itself.
Though the group faced obstacles, like stepping out of their comfort zone to research medical terminology, Lee said they learned important lessons through the project and working with a sponsor.
“It’s not just our grade or having to pass this class to graduate,” said Lee, a mechanical engineering technology senior. “There is a sponsor involved, and we have to meet deadlines and manage our time.”
Carl Dornbush, also a mechanical engineering technology senior, agreed groups learned lessons through their capstone projects. Dornbush said he and five others worked on a stove that uses gelled ethanol as fuel. The process of making the gelled ethanol was a group’s capstone project last year, he said.
“The object was to get [the stove] to be as efficient as possible,” he said. “We did a number of experiments changing different variables and different design elements to try to get the fuel and air mixture just right.”
Dornbush said the group dynamic of the project has been beneficial, as each member has different strengths. Also, since members have different concentrations, there were many different strategies used for problem solving.
“Each department takes a different approach to problem solving, so that was good for each of us because we got to see the advantages of doing things different ways,” Dornbush said.
Through the process of creating the stove, the group encountered problems, but they were successful in the end, and their project offers a significant contribution to stove science, he said.
“I think we’ve made a lot of progress,” Dornbush said. “I’m proud of that because there wasn’t a lot of science out there for us to look at. I think our report is good groundwork for the future.”
The student project exposition will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday at the Union Cooley Ballroom B on the Polytechnic Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
Reach the reporter at abigail.gilmore@asu.edu.
