VT ECE
Design Experience "Virtual" Expo Spring 2020

The Major Design Experience provides each of our participating undergraduate and graduate students a culminating project experience. Each student contributes their collective knowledge and skills as part of an engineering project team to solve meaningful challenges for an exciting, real-world project. This semester, the students encountered significant unanticipated challenges (and opportunities) due to a global pandemic. After an extended Spring Break, our students did not return to campus nor to the MDE design studio for final product build and test. They did, however, analyze and react to an unanticipated event; reestablish remote, distributed communications; and conduct detailed project planning and refactoring to bring their project as close to completion as the situation allowed. Teams conducted remote video meetings, planning, and work sessions to share expertise and guide remote operations. Some shipped parts back and forth. While these are not our intended plan, the students thrived and rose to meet the challenges with a resilience that was impressive.

This year’s Expo event is a purely virtual, asynchronous event. We still seek to showcase the teamwork, communications, project management, and engineering prowess of 104 students across 27 projects; but in new and meaningful ways, we also seek to highlight their adaptability and resilience. Each student team recorded, with dispersed participants, their final customer handoff meeting in lieu of a more formal technical presentation. Every team produced their final project poster; while some projects are complete or near complete; some focused more on documenting project current state and proposing a plan for a potential continuation project to their customers. We are excited to share our students work under these circumstances, and we offer this as evidence of the grit and resolve our emerging young engineers can produce and are now prepared to bring into your teams and organizations. They are our collective contribution to the next generation of engineers; ready to overcome global challenges.

This would not have been possible without the support of our industry partners, our subject matter experts, and a host of other professionals committed to providing our students with these exceptional educational engineering experiences. Thanks to all.

Congratulations to each of the students; their dedication and diligence are evidenced in these 27 projects. On behalf of these students, and from me personally, thanks again to our industry sponsors, our subject matter experts, and our MDE faculty for their tremendous support in developing our next generation of engineers.

Luke Lester
Roanoke Electric Steel Professor and Department Head
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering