Designing Change One Project at a Time
Valparaiso University’s College of Engineering is a place where students come in with an idea of what they want their future to look like, and our faculty help guide them until they have the resources to make that future a reality. Georges El-Howayek, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is one of the faculty members who supervise and advise the senior design course that is a requirement for engineering students to graduate. This course was created in a way that provides students with real world experience and allows them to be placed in an environment that mimics the current industry standards without leaving campus.
“One of the biggest objectives of this class is to give students a real-world experience,” Professor El-Howayek says. “We give them a problem and we give them a customer and it becomes their job to solve it. Even our office space is designed with an industry mindset, because we want to make it as close as what they will see when they graduate and take on those jobs.”
Students and faculty members start reaching out to businesses and organizations in the Valpo area around April to expand their contact list. Their objective is to create useful and warranted products that will work to solve an issue in the community, or aid community members in daily tasks.
“Last year we worked with Opportunity Enterprises, a local nonprofit organization,” Professor El-Howayek says. “They create rubber bands and they do it by hand with scissors, which is a lot of wear and tear on the hands of the user and the scissors. So, they wanted a device that would do the same work in an automated way and we created that for them. Our students designed, built, and tested their product and at the end of the day were able to present it as a solution for this establishment.”
Our students enjoy doing work in the Valpo community, but they also find solutions for projects right here on campus. The photo booth now in the Harre Union was a collaborative effort between the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. Both groups were able to finish their senior design projects, while working together to refurbish the photo booth. The booth itself was a high maintenance device that required certain chemicals to operate and would need to be cleaned out and restocked constantly.
“We wanted to conserve the retro photo booth experience and we wanted to keep the old-style tech without having to deal with photo processing and chemicals,” Professor El-Howayek says. “The engineering part was making the tech work. The digital part, taking photos, uploading to a server, and collecting email addresses from the users and then we automated the process to email the photos to the user.”
The students were exposed to the nature of collaborative work as they met up with their arts and sciences counterparts on a weekly basis to discuss plans and designs. This is just one example of the work that students do on campus to put the skills they learn into practice and give back to their university. Professor El-Howayek and other engineering faculty supervisors are always encouraging students to ask around campus to see if there are projects that they can take on.
“My favorite one that we did so far is the trailer mast we did for VUPD,” Professor El-Howayek says. “We built, on the trailer, a telescoping mast that can go up 30 ft in the air, and it’s motorized so it can go up and down. It is completely solar powered, it has a 360 camera with a 30x optical zoom on it, and it also has internet access which allows us to remotely log into the trailer from our office and control the camera and watch the video regardless of where the trailer is.”
VUPD Chief of Police Chuck Garber has continually let the students and faculty know how appreciative he is of the invention, because of its usefulness and top-notch structure. This immersive senior capstone project allows for our students to see their work put into good use and Professor El-Howayek notes that students constantly take pictures of the trailer, when they see it on campus, and share with each other, as well as their mentoring faculty members. Our faculty members strive to see every student reach their full potential, and through senior design projects such as these, our students push themselves to create real change within their community and within themselves.