April 27, 2007 == MEDIA ADVISORY
Summary: Calvin College senior engineering majors will display a wide variety
of design projects on Saturday, May 5 on campus, everything from TiVo for the
radio to a seed popper to a clean water project for developing nations.
Full story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2006-07/calvin-engineers.htm
Calvin College will hold its 23rd annual Senior Design Open House from 4:30
through 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 5 at the Calvin Engineering Building. The
yearly event, a showcase of projects tackled by teams of senior engineering
students, is the capstone of the Calvin engineering program.
The projects will be on display in both the Prince Engineering Design Center
and the Vermeer Engineering Projects Center, and the teams will be on hand to
explain the finer points of their designs to family, friends and other
visitors.
The teams, various combinations of senior-level mechanical, electrical, civil
and chemical engineering students, work for two semesters to tackle a real-life
design quandary from a whole array of engineering fields. Two of the projects
represent the wide-ranging ingenuity that will be on display at the open house.
Team 7 has produced machine that pops amaranth, a highly nutritious plant and
a versatile cash crop in developing nations. Popping amaranth not only
increases the nutritional value of the plant, it ups its market value to three
to four times of that of the unpopped grain—making it an extremely lucrative
crop for farmers in Africa, South America and elsewhere.
On the other hand, Team 1, titled “fmNow” is targeting the developed
world. Their project is a data storage system that applies the TiVo concept to
FM radio.
“It's a nice convenience for a car radio,” says chemical engineering
professor Aubrey Sykes, a coordinator of the design projects. “If you're in
the middle of the news, and you want to hear the beginning of the program, you
can back it up. If you're in the middle of a song, you can back it up.”
Both projects, Sykes emphasized, embody the values the Calvin engineering
program builds into its student engineers.
“Everything that we do is targeted toward improving God's world and
improving the kingdom that's given to us. Much of it is geared toward helping
developing areas, but much of it is also geared toward improving the world we
live in.”
The other 11 teams have applied their engineering know-how to everything from
Stirling engines to rice straw and have tackled design sites as close as
Calvin's campus and as far away as Haiti.
The student engineers will get another chance to present their work later from
7:30 through 9 p.m. in the Science Building and the Chapel Undercroft,
following a special 6 p.m. dinner in their honor.
-end-
Received on Fri Apr 27 12:49:12 2007
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