Senior Design Project Showcase goes virtual

by Liezl Bitas and Cary Osborne

CSUN mechanical engineering students on the Formula SAE Internal Combustion vehicle team spent the past academic year building a race car for competition in the national level. Photo by Bruno Lucioni.

The College of Engineering and Computer Science’s annual Senior Design Project Showcase took the form of a live, online presentation this past year, instead of the traditional in-person competition.

“[Presenting at the May 1 showcase] gave us a little bit of closure for our project, because we got to show what we actually did,” said Jacob Vorzimer ’20 (Mechanical Engineering). “It also gave us the opportunity to show the college what we’ve been working on so hard in that lab for a year. And it felt really good.”

Vorzimer and the dozens of members of the Formula SAE Internal Combustion vehicle team worked as many as 60 hours a week during the 2019-20 academic year to build and test their race car. Vorzimer said he and his fellow seniors hoped to keep the ball rolling, even beyond graduation, to continue manufacturing and testing their vehicle over the summer and have it ready in time for an online competition in June.

At CSUN’S online showcase, students wowed the virtual audience with 24 projects, which included a drone that can save lives, a robot that can paint walls, a canoe made out of concrete that can float, a computer system that can control a fleet of bots, and much more. Students presented their work in 15-minute oral presentations through Zoom, which enabled them to share slideshow presentations and demos with audience members.