A MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

Michael Collins Professor and Chair

Welcome to our eighth annual Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Symposium.

This exciting event provides our final-year student teams an opportunity to showcase their design projects to the general public, to industry partners and sponsors, and to the university community.

The students have worked hard from conceptualization to finished product and are being judged on a variety of skills. Their end-to-end process included identifying needs, creating solutions and designs to address a variety of challenging problems in diverse areas including: novel commercial devices, medical apparatus, motorsports, rocket engines, sustainability and green energy products. They demonstrated their competence in applying the knowledge and skills acquired over the course of their undergraduate academic and co-operative work terms.

This is also a major component in our continuous improvement plan for the Mechanical Engineering program, a plan for providing the best possible education experience for our students. The enthusiasm with which these teams present their work should be evident, and attests to the effort and teamwork that they have put into their projects over the past eight months.

We invite you to engage with the students about their designs, admire the presentations and prototypes in the platform, and check out their videos. When you are inspired and excited by the students’ work, feel free to suggest other design project challenges and opportunities to them and their course instructors (contact information at the end of this brochure). To find out more follow us on our website.

We are proud of our Mechanical students for their achievements this past term. In addition to meeting the challenges of the capstone design project, they had to overcome the additional challenge of completing their design projects in a remote work environment. We all recognize and appreciate the effort it took to get here. We are also eternally grateful to our esteemed Mechanical Engineering professors, technical staff and administration, the companies and people who help educate our students in the co-operative program, and to the kindness of our sponsors of this event. Your support is important and valued. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Michael Collins Professor and Chair mike.collins@uwaterloo.ca

Symposium Details