First Year Real World Competition To Motivate Students

First-year students in Purdue University’s Mechanical Engineering Technology program are normally advised to take courses in English, Speech, Mathematics, Physics and MET classes in materials, and analytical and computational methods. While the materials class offers interesting elements with various types of material testing, the analytical and computational methods class is basically a mathematics review class combined with an introduction to spreadsheet analysis. There is nothing much in the first two semesters of the MET program to create excitement in first-year students, and this presents something of a retention challenge for the program. In order to provide a real-world experience and an enjoyable competition to motivate students, the MET department at Purdue University in Columbus, Indiana partnered with a local company, MotoTron (www.mototron.com), to present the Mechatronics Career Discovery Challenge. Mechatronics combines mechanical, electrical, and software design to produce complex machines. This particular challenge involves writing the software to program a vehicle to navigate a course using a global positioning system (GPS) sensor. MotoTron representatives provided specific training with Matlab and their own custom-designed software to accomplish the challenge. The vehicle is approximately 4 foot by 2 foot with 4 tires controlled by a steering actuator, a thrust motor, a brake solenoid, and a GPS sensor. Also on the vehicle are heading, yaw rate, and wheel speed sensors to be used for data acquisition. Students are grouped into teams of 2 or 3 for the competition. Also invited to the competition are teams from the local high schools and the local community college. Teams are grouped into high school and college divisions. There are two 7-hour days of training using the Purdue University computers and lab facilities several weeks in advance of the competition. Additionally, teams are required to submit their controller software to a design review prior to the competition. After the competition, teams are also required to make a performance presentation, summarizing their data acquisition and performance of the vehicle. The paper details the training, the competition and the results of design reviews and performance presentations.