FYELC Students present their Arduino projects at Design Expo

First year engineering students in Associate Academic Specialist Jennifer Love’s GE1501 Cornerstone of Engineering 1 course were challenged this semester to apply the engineering design process to design, build, test and market a SparkFun system, “app” or product that addresses and solves an authentic engineering problem for a particular group of humans, animals or other living things.  After conducting a research project and a literature review in the first half of the semester about an authentic engineering problem of their choice, teams of 3-4 students then wrote project proposals to solve their authentic engineering problem as if they were real engineering companies.  Students applied what they learned in the course about the engineering design process, C++ programming, SparkFun microcontrollers and electronics controlled by Arduino software to design, develop and program original solutions using accelerometers, microphones, pushbuttons, light emitting diodes (LEDs), temperature sensors, light sensors, infrared radiation detectors, force sensors, and other components.  Students used the “makerspace” resources in the First Year Engineering Learning and Innovation Center in 368SN to help build their projects.  On Monday, December 5, student teams presented their final projects to a panel of judges including Visiting Lecturer Stephen Golden from the Entrepreneurship and Innovation department in the College of Business, Nicholas Fuchs from Northeastern’s Center for STEM Education, and Christina McNeil from the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Office.

Student projects included concussion detection systems for football and other sports applications, a music translator for people with cochlear implants, an optical food quality detection system for genetically modified corn, a music visualizer and transposer, a safety skateboard, a haptically enabled surgery simulator that provides sensory feedback to the surgeon, an instrumented musical glove that uses an accelerometer to encourage physical activity, an interactive alarm clock for college students, an environmentally monitored habitat for a pet bearded dragon, a UV light and temperature monitoring system for the food industry, a sound detection system for the new Tappan Zee Bridge riverbed construction project, a homemade EKG device, a personal musical tone learning device, a smart smoke detector system, a hot beverage tester, a more efficient airport security line management system, an instrumented tennis racquet, an agricultural soil monitoring system, and various electronic quiz, educational games, and personal security devices.

Students will have the option to improve and further develop their projects in GE1502 next semester when the Cornerstone course continues.

Related Faculty: Jennifer Love, Nicolas Fuchs, Christina McNeil