Mentor program for collegiate competition projects

Introduction:

SAE is a leader in demonstrating the importance of major engineering competition projects to engineering education. Colleges around the world have adopted this model and included FSAE and similar competitions as part of their educational program. Despite budget limitations, universities are increasingly moving to major competition projects to develop and demonstrate the engineering skills of their students.

The excitement of building and testing remote controlled airplanes, autonomous underwater vehicles, Mini-Baja and FSAE racecars and other projects attracts students and provides them meaningful experience in team engineering, as well as the opportunity to prove their skills to potential employers. Industrial mentors are needed to team with the faculty advisors in order to ensure the student engineers get the most of these experiences.

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Some years ago my 2008 FSAE team prepared Wiki pages with background information for racecar engineering. Those pages were recently rediscovered by our 2012 team. There is a lot of interesting and useful information. Please see the links:
1. Summer 2007 racecar research; and
2. Fall 2007 racecar research.

Planning for the 2012 Energy Invitational is underway. Please sign up at the website Energy Invitational to get more information.

Here is a video of the launch of the 2011 UCI Rocket. Congratulations team!

Recently, I became aware of the overall poor quality of the articles on machines in Wikipedia, and I have spent quite a bit of time revising these articles over the past month. I hope my contributions are an improvement. Please take a look:

• Machine (mechanical)
• Mechanical system
• Linkage (mechanical)
• Screw axis
• Burmester’s theory
• Four-bar linkage
• Mechanism (engineering)
• Instantaneous center of rotation
• Screw theory
• Dual quaternion
• Mechanical advantage
• Overconstrained mechanism
• Kinematic pair
• Virtual work

As you may know anyone may edit Wikipedia, and it is intended to allow user communities to maintain the quality of particular sets articles. It is important that we take this opportunity because Wikipedia is an important resource to our students.

Select this link to access the SAE SoCal section facebook page with photos of activities on Thursday of the 2011 FSAE California.

This is a video from Monday, May 30 showing the first run of our FSAE race car. There is a lot of work left to do on this car, but this is great to see.

UCI’s Center for Engineering Science in Design, Toyota, Millenworks, Kruse Technology Partnership, McCarthy Design Associates, Airflow Systems, and Southern California SAE worked together to make the 2011 Energy Invitational a success at Willow Springs Motorsports Park.

This is a video of the 2011 Engineering Winter Design Review for UCI. 80 student projects of over 500 engineering seniors were on display for external industry reviewers as well as over 200 Orange County High School students.

This is a group photo of the competitors at our recent 2011 Energy Invitational at the Streets of Willow Springs prepared by Lee-Huang Chen. A higher resolution image can be downloaded at the link: Energy Invitational Photo