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Jack Baskin School of EngineeringUC Santa Cruz

Senior Design Contest features interdisciplinary student projects

Thursday, March 29, 2007
Written by Tim Stephens

The BEEDL team--Karen Liu, Kipling Inscore, Jerome Bougoffa, and Edmond Szeto--won first place in the Senior Design Contest. Photo: Tim Stephens.
Undergraduate students in computer engineering and electrical engineering presented their senior design projects before a panel of judges in the Baskin School of Engineering's Senior Design Contest on Friday, March 23. Contributions from individual donors provided $1,000 in prize money, which was divided among the top three teams.

The top prize of $600 went to the Bluetooth Enabled Electronic Doorlock (BEEDL) project. The team of four students--Edmond Szeto, Jerome Bougoffa, Kipling Inscore, and Karen Liu--developed a door lock that can be opened by entering a password on a cell phone. Their presentation included a working prototype and a product brochure complete with an order form. The team's faculty advisers were Cyrus Bazeghi, lecturer in computer engineering, and Wentai Liu, professor of electrical engineering.

The second-place prize went to Universal Real-time Navigational Assistance (URNA), a pedestrian navigation system for the blind. Third place went to SparcFPGA, an implementation of the OpenSPARC processor design from Sun Microsystems on a type of programmable chip called a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

The senior design projects are completed during a two-quarter course sequence (fall-winter or winter-spring). Students work in cross-disciplinary teams to develop a design and create a prototype. Starting last year, the engineering school has organized a contest at the end of each course sequence.

The judges--all UCSC alumni now working in the high-tech industry--evaluated the student projects on the basis of three criteria: technological innovation and realization; presentation ability; and effective team collaboration. The students presented the results of their work in corporate-style presentations intended to prepare students for real-world work experiences.

"We give them advice and support, but these projects are all the original designs of the students themselves," Bazeghi said.