The Season of Symposia

The third week of March at the University has traditionally marked the occurrence of symposia for Waterloo Engineering. These symposia are a showcase of outcomes from capstone projects that engineering undergraduate students take in accordance with the CEAB to exhibit the understanding of engineering principles over the nearly five years of education. This year too, the exhibits were extremely impressive and definitely exhibited the prowess of Waterloo engineering students to make a project that could make a difference in this world.
On Friday, March 15 this year, the final year students graduating from the Systems Design Engineering showed off their capstone projects. As always, they were truly amazing, from object collectors for application in extraterrestrial rovers to autonomous quadcopters that recognized persons in danger and enabled fast response. Furthermore, there was a variety of third year projects being showcased. These projects also packed some serious punch with a plethora of innovative projects. The winning team for the fourth year design project under the “Peoples’ Choice Award” had developed a custom furniture solution. The best fourth year design project award was split between a smart door project and the autonomous tracking of objects by a quadcopter. A beekeeper effort enhancement system was the recipient of the Best Entrepreneurial Potential Award.
On Monday, the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering students showed off their projects. They too were quite impressive and were of a caliber well above a student project. There were a variety of novel ideas including a 3D printer that printed items from chocolate. There were also designs for a single-player air hockey table where a computer controlled the position of one of the pucks. The winner of the fourth year design project competition for the MME department was a machine that allowed users to deposit silver and other possible conductors to allow for rapid prototyping of electronic components.
On Wednesday, students from the Electronics and Computer Engineering showed off their technical abilities in their own symposium. There were programmable guitar pedals, key-less entry solutions for doors and several other innovative solutions. There were robots that saw what a person did and copied those motions. There were also remote data acquisition boxes. The winners of this symposium was a power monitoring system.
The Friday marked the Management, Software and Nanotechnology Design Symposium. The Nanotechnology Engineering projects truly wowed audiences with innovative projects. There were frost-repellent coatings, anti-microbial coatings, reinforced composite fabrics and flexible electronic sensors for glucose. The winner of the nanotechnology symposium was a flexible smart glass display for advertising applications. Despite being only the second batch of management engineers to graduate, management engineering students came up a variety of great projects. These projects ranged from solutions to improve efficiency of hydroelectric power generation to a system that studied TV analytics in the modern age of streaming and online viewership. The winners for this symposium are yet to be announced at the time of writing. Software Engineering students also exhibited some fine projects. These projects targeted consumers such as piano students. There was also an interesting project that enabled one to place an order for pickup prior to getting to a destination thus avoiding lines. Information for the winners for not accessible for this symposium.