Engineering Design Expo sparks imagination for Anderson elementary students

Published: April 29, 2011

CLEMSON — The wonder of wind tunnels blew through the imaginations of fourth-graders from Anderson's Midway Elementary School at Friday's Engineering Design Expo, a demonstration of projects by Clemson University mechanical engineering majors.

Using sail-driven model cars and windmill-powered lights to test the effectiveness of their wind tunnel designs, students in Clemson's Mechanical Engineering 401 class led more than 100 students through an introduction to engineering in the Fluor Daniel Engineering Innovation Building.

More than simply an engineering project, the Design Expo taught the university students an important facet of work as an engineer: communicating their designs.

"We strive to train our students to contribute significantly once they enter industry. This training includes academic, research and social training," said Joshua Summers, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and the College of Engineering and Science IDEaS Professor — an acronym for Inquiry, Discovery in Engineering and Science.

"We seek to prepare engineers who are capable of looking at seemingly unsolvable problems, finding the core essence of the problems, creating an approach to resolving the problem, and finally to intelligibly communicate the solution to the customer," Summers said.

The Clemson Engineering Design Expo is intended to showcase the work of Clemson students based on their senior design courses in mechanical engineering. The ME 401 course is a precursor to ME 402, in which students solve problems from industry.

Projects change from semester to semester. In this year's Design Expo, teams of engineering students designed, built and delivered functional wind tunnels as educational platforms for the fourth-graders.

"This course sequence serves as both capstones to our undergraduate students' educational careers and cornerstones to the professional careers of our future alumni," Summers said. "This design work is central to our students bridging the gap between the theory addressed in their courses and the application that they will face in industry."

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