Bright Ideas By Lesley V. Kriewald
A lot of bright ideas just stay ideas. Our engineering technology students learn how to turn their bright ideas into marketable products.
Senior design courses never looked so good.
Every engineering student looks forward to the senior design course. It’s where you get a chance to put what you’ve learned into practice. Hold onto your iPod — this one is something special.
Senior electronics and telecommunications engineering technology majors in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution’s two-semester “Capstone Experience” combine entrepreneurship, ethics, leadership and project management training with traditional and not-so-traditional senior design projects in an exciting experience.
Assistant professor and program coordinator Jay Porter, the Victor H. Thompson Professor Joseph Morgan and senior lecturer George Wright designed (excuse the pun) the Capstone Experience to boost students’ project management skills, one area companies that hire engineering technology graduates said the graduates could improve upon. So they linked the project management skills development course with the final semester’s design course.
The experience
In the first half of the sequence, called the project management course, students plan their design projects, from forming teams to identifying their design projects and securing an industry sponsor for the project.
“Each team must operate as if it’s a startup company,” Morgan says. “They create their own names, logos, Web presence, shirts — the works.”
In fact, the student teams were so good and convincing that at least one company didn’t want to work with a group because, on the basis of the team’s Web site, the company felt they were competing with the students’ company.
The students also participate in a weekly entrepreneurship, leadership and ethics seminar series in which 10 executive-level individuals, such as Texas A&M President Robert M. Gates, serve as roundtable discussion leaders. Each team is responsible for identifying a topic and a speaker and then inviting the speakers to class. Discussions during the Spring 2006 course included “Legal, Ethical and Right,” “Facing Moral and Ethical Dilemmas,” “Invention and Commercialization: Where to Begin” and “Leading vs. Managing.”
Senior Anthony Allison says he thinks the seminar series was the most exciting part of the course. “I cannot begin to describe the experience of meeting with such senior industry members and being able to pick their brains on ethical issues, starting a company from scratch, working on projects in teams, leading project teams, unique problems that they have dealt with during their careers and just about anything else you could think of,” Allison says. “I believe that all of the members of my class have benefited from the wealth of knowledge these guests were able to share with us.”
In the second semester, the senior design course, the students must deliver on their project plan with, as Morgan says, “a fully functional unit capable of being evaluated for commercialization.”
It might be something simple you can buy at Radio Shack or a system that the whole state of Texas will use.
Or an automatic guitar tuner. One team designed a device that will automatically tune a guitar with one strum. You can pay $3,500 for a company to modify your guitar for self-tuning, but the Aggies’ invention will cost you only about $200. Morgan says that three engineers from the private sector who reviewed the project say that the algorithm the students used is unique and better than anything the engineers could have come up with.
Porter says, “Five years ago, the students produced very little — a paper and a crude, simple prototype. Today, they’re producing commercially viable things — hardware and software that’s packaged and complete.
“These projects far surpass everything I’ve seen come out of a senior design course.”
The incubator concept
At the start of the design course, teams can agree to let the university help sell the prototypes. The upshot? Getting students to try to start businesses around their prototypes.
Morgan says this incubator concept enhances the undergraduate experience by motivating the students to learn.
And it’s working. In the fourth annual Ideas Challenge hosted by Texas A&M’s Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship, a team from Morgan and Porter’s sequence — seniors Matthew Johnston, Kurt Richardson, Jud Chilton and Cody Thurston — won first place and $3,000 in start-up cash with their project, the Expandable Vehicle Information System, a Bluetooth-enabled dashboard console that can interpret everything from a car’s malfunctions and steps to correct them to alerts from rear bumper sensors.
The National Science Foundation, or NSF, likes the incubator concept, too. In a preproposal evaluation, Texas A&M recently selected Morgan and Porter’s concept to go forward as the university’s response to the NSF Partners For Innovation call for proposals.
In addition to the university’s help in selling the prototypes, a separate private company has opened offices in the Bryan–College Station area to partner with Morgan and Porter through their students to help take the projects from prototypes to products. The company will evaluate prototypes for commercial viability and then take the projects forward.
“The key is that partnership,” Morgan says. “That’s why NSF is so enamored with our concept: We’ve formed this partnership that will repeat.”
Making it work
Porter and Morgan say that they’re looking at viable products instead of technological developments, at intellectual property “know-how” instead of patents. Their aim is the know-how to produce a product and to make it work — and how to make it quickly, how to market it and how to make it profitable.
“If we have 100 projects and only one starts a business,” Morgan says, “that will be a complete success and will do more to stimulate further students than anything we can do as faculty and as a university.
“‘It can’t be done’ has been removed because we’ve shown it can be done.” 
Here’s a sample of products developed by Capstone Experience students.
SureSense™ wireless sensor system
Medical equipment can be cumbersome, difficult to wear and embarrassing at times. Fusion Networks seeks to remedy this trend with the SureSense™ wireless sensor system. Removing the wires that connect electrodes and medical electronics will free patients from the inconvenience of being tethered to equipment and greatly increase their comfort levels. (Lucas Folegatti, Sloan Williams, D. Gray Eby, Justin Vierra)
Project EVIS
Project EVIS aims to provide greater driver awareness. By using a console unit located on the dash of a vehicle, drivers will be able to obtain crucial information about their cars. This unit will provide explanations for check-engine lights and notify the driver if they are about to bump into an object while parking. This system will provide cost-effective high-end features for consumers to install in their cars. (Matthew Johnston, Jud Chilton, Kurt Richardson and Cody Thurston)
Auto-Tune
Auto-Tune is a self-tuning electric guitar. The guitar will have a user-friendly interface that will allow the operator to choose among several different tuning styles. The Auto-Tune system will not affect the performance or the appearance of the guitar and will be powered by a stereo cable that is connected to a stomp-box-sized power supply. (Chad Stone, Evan Gooch, Eric Pesek, Matthew Tilleman)
Game Guardian
The Game Guardian is targeted to parents and guardians who need some help in structuring game usage of the kids they supervise. With the Game Guardian, parents will not have to worry about monitoring the amount of time kids spend playing video games, eliminating one more thing busy parents worry about. (Kyle Royder, Don Hatchett)
Sensor Apparatus for Valued Energy
Time-of-day billing will allow power companies to determine the amount of power used by customers on an hour-to-hour basis instead of a month-to-month basis. With this information, customers can be charged for their power usage based on what time of day they are consuming it. The Sensor Apparatus for Valued Energy (SAVE) will use a Broadband over Power Line communications interface to automatically retrieve the power reading from a kilowatt-hour meter at regular intervals. This method of meter reading will provide power companies with an effective and economical way of implementing time-of-day billing. (Anthony Allison, Todd Celinski, Robert Feldman, Clayton Fischer)
Texas A&M Engineer Online
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