Overcoming a Challenge in University and What You Learned as a Result

Introduction

I have been a student at university for 1 year now I am on my second year, and over the course of my stay I have grown and learned more than I thought possible. I came to this university from college already knowing that I wanted to be an Engineer student; I had taken numerous English’s & math test and though I knew exactly what I was headed for. Going through the Engineering program has taught me so much more than stuff about design and product case, it has taught me how to be me. I have learned here how to deliver and express my ideas, how to think of solutions, and how to find the answers to the things that I don't know. Most importantly I have learned how important Engineering and designing products are and how important overcoming a challenge, and what you learned as a result is.

Overcoming a Grand Challenge in University

When I started at university, I thought I was going to spend the next 3 years working with medical devices, discussing them and then writing about them. That was what I did in college courses read about biomedical tools, so I didn't think it would be much different here. On the surface, to an outsider, I am sure that this is what it appears that Engineers do. In most all my classes I did read, discuss, and write report & do projects; however, I quickly found out that that there was so much more to it. One specific experience I had during my first year was about the grand challenge we did during the month of May. This grand challenge really shows how integrated this learning is. Instead of just coming up with ideas on how to save peoples life from natural disaster we proceeded to build and put things into practice what we had learnt during the year (being innovative). I decided to join a team of 4. We had a great time and we learned so much more than ever we could have done on our own. The opportunity to do that showed me that there are so many ways of being innovative and that one can learn at the same time having fun and while being educational.

The Essence of the Grand Challenge

The Grand challenge was about undertaking major mission that runs on the cease of the first and second year for all Engineering students. Students are formed in groups to design and integrate what would be helpful to save peoples life on natural disasters. The aim of the gran challenge was to illustrate out matters that will arise and find solutions to those problems. The gran challenge was designed to provide us experience of taking a venture from idea to demonstrator. It was also designed to be a difficult venture, however additionally we hoped that it was going to be a moment of laughter. It was a hard process but at the same time positive.

The Structure of the Team and the Solution to Overcoming the Challenge

The duration of the Gran challenge was 3 weeks, 4 students formed my group our team name was The Sixcue each of us had a tittle we were assigned to, I was the operation manager as my role was to take the lead to make sure that instructions were delivered, to order parts and make sure everything worked at the end of the gran challenge. The scenario we had opted for and the idea we came up with was the scenario of a burning building and how to lead people out of a burning building. So the solution we thought about was to have a flying drone that will deploy a rope on which people would hold on to as to be able to come out of the burning building. Additionally the drone will deploy a walking stick that would be attached to the back side of it for visually impaired users. Another idea we came up with was that the drone will display instructive sign or projects images on the wall with a projector that users could obey to and lead to the exit of building.

Conclusion

We had 3 gateways, gateway one was an informal gateway we had to let assessors know the name we had chosen for our team and what roles we had assign to each person and the vision we had for the demonstrator. Gateway two was to present our design and the solution to the assessors by that doing we had a presentation ready and CAD demonstrator to illustrate our idea.