UNB engineering students took home first and second place in two competition tracks at the Canadian Engineering Competition at Ryerson University in March. Competitors from 15 participating schools participated in a total of eight different competitions.
Andrew Robart, Sam Guitard, Brodie Theriault and Scarlett Taviss, fourth-year students, won the innovative design track for their 3D printed pediatric prosthetic hand that was developed for their senior design project.
“Many pediatric prosthetic hands only have a pinch force of two pounds and open 20 millimetres wide, which isn’t sufficient for picking up most objects, " says Robart. Our task is to build a hand that has six pounds of pinch force and must open 50 millimetres wide."
The team of Jacob Smith, Brandon Michael Richardson, Alexander James O’Donnell and Amir Eldesoky, third- and fourth-year students, placed second in the programming track. “Our programming task was to design a website that extracts data about the availability of solar and wind resources to be used to assess the potential of using renewable energy in a specific location,” says Eldesoky, fourth-year electrical and computer engineering student.
Both teams placed first at the Atlantic Engineering Competition.
In January, four teams of engineering students from UNB's Fredericton and Saint John campuses took home first place in the innovative design, programming, communications, and junior design track categories at the Atlantic Engineering Competition held at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s. They all moved onto Canadian Engineering Competition in March.
Aven Chiam, Matthew Duguay, Nicolas Matchett and Kelton Ireland, second-year mechanical engineering students from UNB’s Saint John campus, won the junior design track of the competition with their mechanism to harness wind power to create energy and collect water for the people of St. John’s, NL.
“The engineering department was ecstatic and really proud of them when we heard that they had won the Atlantic competition. It has been a long time since we’ve sent a team to one of the engineering competitions. They represented us well, and I know they will do the same on the national level,” says Dale Roach, senior teaching associate in the department of engineering on the Saint John campus.
Laura Wishart, fourth-year civil engineering student in Fredericton and president of the UNB Engineering Undergraduate Society, won the communications category with her presentation on the process of stream restoration.
“I took on this topic for my presentation because it is something that I became passionate about through my civil engineering education,” says Wishart.
