Enterprise Blog

With gas prices in Michigan hovering around $4.29 per gallon, how does a car that can get up to 1,000 miles per gallon sound?

It’s that lofty goal that has Joseph Eckstein and his team from Michigan Tech going the extra mile to build the most fuel efficient vehicle possible.

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The 13th annual Undergraduate Expo was held on Thursday, April 18, 2013 in the J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library.

The winners of the Michigan Tech Undergraduate Expo Awards have been posted. Congratulations to all the winners.

The Undergraduate Expo highlights hands-on, discovery-based learning at Michigan Tech. Nearly one thousand students in Enterprise and Senior Design teams showcase their work and compete for awards. A panel of judges, made up of corporate representatives and Michigan Tech staff and faculty members, critique the projects. Many of them are sponsored by industry, which allows students to gain valuable experience through competition at the Expo, as well as direct exposure to real industrial problems. The Expo is a combined effort of the College of Engineering and the Institute for Leadership and Innovation.

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submitted by Paige Hackney, Institute for Leadership and Innovation

The Upper Peninsula Health Care Network (UPHCN) agreed to match donations received for the student-run Mobile Wellness Systems project, which is converting a 15-passenger van into a mobile health clinic for Ghana. The UPHCN gave their matching donation to the team on Wednesday at an event held in the Rozsa Lobby. Administrators from UPHCN, Aspirus Keweenaw, Baraga County Memorial and Portage Health Systems were in attendance.

Students from Michigan Tech’s Pavlis Institute for Global Technological Leadership, in collaboration with the International Business Ventures (IBV) Enterprise and a School of Technology Senior Design team, have joined forces on the project. In addition to van reconfiguration, students are coordinating with area hospitals to secure donations of working, quality, used medical equipment for incorporation into the van.

The team also accepts monetary donations to purchase other supplies for the project and cover shipping costs associated with transporting the van to Ghana later this spring. Michigan Tech’s Superior Ideas crowd-sourcing website was contacted and helped solicit project funds.

Mobile Wellness Systems seeks to provide diagnostic, preventative and treatment services to Ghanaians who live in villages without easy access to larger medical facilities due to their remote location and who are not serviced by international aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. The team’s mission is to equip doctors from larger city hospitals with the tools needed to provide healthcare to these disadvantaged populations living in villages located outside of city centers.

The prototype this year’s students are developing will be used for testing in Ghana this summer by local doctors who will be treating and caring for many people who previously had limited access to adequate healthcare. These doctors will provide invaluable feedback concerning the mobile clinic allowing this sustainable project to expand to more villages in the future.

If you would like more information or to discover how you can contribute to this multidisciplinary student effort, contact Paige Hackney, phackney@mtu.edu or 7-4371 in the Institute for Leadership and Innovation.

Also see previous article: “IBV/Pavlis Mobile Clinic Featured on TV News”

by Jenn Donovan, public relations director
A team from Dollar Bay High School, part of Michigan Tech’s High School Enterprise program, has won the national George B. Hartzog Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service in the youth volunteer category. Their teacher, Tech alum Matt Zimmer, will accept the award from the National Park Service in Washington, DC, on Feb. 21. Tech’s Department of Engineering Fundamentals is purchasing airline tickets for two of the students to accompany him.
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Michigan Tech Undergraduate Expo 2013
When: Thursday, April 18, 2013
Where: J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library, 3rd floor
Time: 8 am to 3 pm

To register, visit Student Info page

Be sure to check out these additional competitions and opportunities for Expo teams (these are all optional):
1) Submit additional images for the Undergraduate Expo Image Contest – Click here for more info

2) Submit a team video for display on the Expo YouTube Channel – Click here for more info

3) Design a MindTrekkers activity for school children

4) Register for the Michigan Tech Patent Disclosure Competition – more details coming soon!

Attention Alumni, Faculty, & Friends:
Interested in judging at the Expo?
Please click here to register.

by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor, Tech Today

Broomball is a big deal at Michigan Tech: 1,400 students compete on 240 teams that play 1,000 games a season, sliding around on outdoor ice rinks chasing a ball with brooms in hand.

It’s only fitting that the biggest game on campus should have some big, high-tech scoreboards.

“We can do that,” said the Robotics Enterprise. The student-run team began planning in April 2012, designing over the summer and assembling the scoreboards in time for this winter’s season.

Recently, Charlie Rysenga, project leader, was busy connecting pieces of the 4-foot by 8-foot metallic monsters with pop rivets.

“I’ll use about a thousand by the time I’m done,” he says. The third-year electrical engineering major from Berkley, Mich., figures each scoreboard will weigh 200 pounds when finished.

They’ll be a vast improvement over the old, manual, wooden versions currently hung near the black, silver and gold rinks. The new models will follow that Michigan Tech color scheme.

“We are having them painted at Advance Tec, ,” says George Olszewski, a fourth-year business major from Columbus, Ind. The company is donating the labor, after hours.

Olszewski was drilling into the new components, making space for the scoreboard clocks. “These will have running clocks, and that’s a big deal,” he says. “No more guessing how much time is left.”

Olszewski doubles as the broomball connection with the Inter-Residence Hall Council, which runs the competition.

Megan Crowley, a fourth-year applied ecology major from Milford, Mich., shows off the custom-made control boxes, with special “glove-sized buttons” for the outdoor scorekeeping. She is playing on two broomball teams this winter.

“We’ll have local time, too,” she says, working on internal connections on each unit.

And once they are mounted at the rinks, the whole system will be networked for real-time scoring on the broomball website. For those enhancements, Olszewski says they have had great help from IT, Telcom, and Facilities Management, who re-leveled the three outdoor rinks and added conduit and block work to make it all come together.

So, how many total hours have gone into this project?

“Probably 5,000, between the Robotics Enterprise, the broomball people, IT and Facilities,” says Rysenga.

“And the Advance Tec guy is working overnight so we can grab them the next morning,” Olszewski adds. He points to a gleaming black scoreboard standing in the sunlit front hall of the Minerals and Materials Engineering Building.

When the three scoreboards are done, they’ll have cost about $10,000, including $800 to ship the weatherproof components from China.

“Broomball can afford it,” Olszewski says, smiling. “We had to get the exact components we wanted. We shopped around a lot, and we found the best ones in China.”

The green LED scoreboards will be highly visible on the east end of campus.

“And, they’ll be great at night,” says Crowley.

The new mechanisms will add to the enjoyment, no doubt, of the distinctly Michigan Tech tradition of broomball.

A team of Michigan Technological University students is developing a mobile medical clinic for the rural poor of Ghana. The students are converting a van that was donated by Husky Motors in order to build the clinic. The team was featured on TV6 News recently.

Previous Michigan Tech news article

TV6 News story about IBV/Pavlis Medivan

An short informational video about Michigan Tech International Business Ventures Enterprise and the Infant Heart Annunciator Project.

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has released Infusing Real World Experiences into Engineering Education which showcases 29 engineering programs at colleges and universities across the nation that effectively incorporate such activities into their curriculum and highlights best practices for schools seeking to create new programs. The publication was sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) in support of the AMD NextGen Engineer initiative.

See Tech Today Article

NAE News Article
See the report

From Tech Today November 12, 2012 by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor

The Human Interface Design Enterprise was showing off their driver simulator in Rekhi Hall on November 8th for Usability Day. The event is celebrated around the world, and this was the fifth year Michigan Tech was involved. The event showcasess usability, when technologies or procedures make sense to us and when we can learn–and remember–how to use them, make few errors and feel satisfied with our experiences.
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