Engineers have space to innovate
By Jack Wagner
This year undergraduate students at Santa Clara are getting a chance to work with NASA through the Aerospace Innovation Challenge.
The competition is designed to help undergraduate engineers learn to innovate and develop entrepreneurship skills.
It is fostering working relationships between engineering students and students from other departments.
The Aerospace Innovation Challenge involves six teams of undergraduate students partaking in three tasks.
The winning team after these competitions is awarded $2000.
Besides the possibility of winning the monetary reward, other students are participating for fun, for class credit and for a chance to prove themselves to NASA.
The teams are composed of six students each.
The majority of these students are part of the School of Engineering, but there are students from the other schools as well.
Christopher Kitts, a professor of mechanical and electrical engineering, is leading the project.
The first task for the teams involved gathering data from the NASA Ames GeneSat-1 satellite, and then decoding it.
To gather the data, the teams were given an antenna that had to be manually aimed at the satellite as it passed overhead, and were helped by a student assistant who connected the antenna to a computer and a radio.
The teams knew they were aiming the antenna correctly when they heard a noise similar to a dial tone.
With precise aiming, the computer would be able to decode the information from the satellite. These messages were worth extra points.
To get this strong signal, the groups built contraptions that would help them aim the antenna.
"We went behind Benson and took some boxes," said Freshman Nick Xydes of getting materials for the competition.
The first competition ended on Nov. 3.
The second challenge started the same day the first competition ended.
Although the final task is a mystery, the second task is not.
In the second task, each team develops a one-minute public service announcement that promotes NASA to teens and people in their early twenties.
The videos will be posted on Youtube and will be judged by a panel evaluating the overall quality of the video.
The videos will be available for public viewing on Nov. 16.
The individual video messages do not represent the views of NASA, but rather what the students believe NASA should do in the future while targeting Generation Y.
The school received a Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network award, making the challenge possible.
The KEEN award is a grant sponsored by The Kern Family Foundation and it is helping the School of Engineering develop and implement new initiatives that will help students focus on engineering innovation and entrepreneurship.
Santa Clara's School of Engineering is using the grant toward adding a new course next year and adding extracurricular activities for the engineering students.
Last year, the grand lead to one of the most popular extracurricular activities -- the BMW Product Pitch.
In February of last year, six teams had 22 hours to develop and present a new product concept that would harmonize with the BMW Mini brand.
The teams gave short presentations that were judged by engineers from BMW and venture capitalists from the local area.
The grand prize for the previous year was $500. This year's prize is $2000.
This year, it has lead to the Aerospace Innovation Challenge, inspired by the success of last year's challenge.
The main objective of the program according to Kitts is to "broaden the point of view of engineers we already have in the program."
The program's goal is to have a competition at least once a quarter.
For more information visit the "Innovate at SCU" Web site at http://innovate.engr.scu.edu.
Contact Jack Wagner at JCWagner@scu.edu.