Competition Based Minor Projects–A New Experience

Abstract

The existing practise for choosing projects for Mini, Minor and Capstone projects is either open ended, wherein the students propose the topic/area/field they wish to work in, or theme based, where the department defines the field/area in which the students pursue their projects. A novel approach to projects was introduced in the department where a national level student competition (SAE Eco kart) was chosen carefully to reflect on the quality and quantity of project work, which required all the project teams to work towards a common goal. The Competition was aimed at designing a single passenger kart operated by a Motor AC or DC, where Source of running the motor is a battery. The theme for the competition as specified by SAE India for the current academic year was adopted for the minor project and minor changes were incorporated in the rule book to suit important factors such as curriculum, timeline and available resources. The primary objective of the theme chosen was to enable students to apply the fundamental knowledge gained in the curriculum and develop capabilities to formulate problem, design by analytical and computational methods, create manufacturing drawings and simulate the automotive systems and integrate them in virtual environment.Being a multidisciplinary project the project teams further subdivided themselves into groups to design individual systems. Design goals as well as the expectations were communicated during an orientation session in the first week of the semester. Further, necessary tutorials from subject experts and live demonstration of a working model were conducted. Teams were regularly monitored by the review team (authors) through regular interactions and official review sessions. Measure of performance of each team was done through rubrics. Evaluating the current effort authors felt students were able to demonstrate the planned objectives.