Welcome to 2023 Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Day

For the first year ever, students have access to a dedicated design center.

Craig M. Berge Design Day is a story of remarkable student success and the ways engineers improve lives.

We have much to be thankful for this year, including a dedicated Engineering Design Center for students, which bolsters the college’s commitment to experiential learning over all four years. Every engineering student now has 24-7 access to a spacious, well-equipped, safe place to collaborate and build.

People Helping People

Our seniors are thrilled to tell you about their projects. Not only are the designs a testament to their technical agility and creativity, but also the projects show why the college’s graduates are highly sought after in industry and government.

Students worked on ways to make mining and farming more sustainable: 3D-printed construction materials from tailings, an autonomous spider for collecting agricultural data, algae to reduce greenhouse gases, and solar energy covers for canal water evaporation. Teams developed a basketball shooting robot and an interactive model of the Tucson power grid to educate children. They created a haptic imaging device for blind scientists and airplane controls for armless pilots. They designed ways to keep people and animals safer – a drone to monitor wildfires, throw phone for hostage negotiations, and pet and livestock tracker, to name just a few. There are medical devices, robots for space exploration, and wastewater recycling projects, not to mention a BattleBot!

If you miss anything at Design Day, you can still learn about the 99 projects online in the students’ presentation videos, which will be available following the awards ceremony, where $47,000 in prize money will be presented.

Thank You for Your Support

Design Day and the Interdisciplinary Capstone Course are part of a lineup of competitions, maker fests, design courses, entrepreneurial and business instruction, and industry and community projects in the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program. The program immerses undergraduates at all levels in real-world experiences that integrate design, manufacturing and commercialization.

None of this would be possible without all the hard work behind the scenes. We are grateful to the donors, program mentors, university and industry partners, sponsors, judges, faculty, staff and alumni who help make the program and event a highly successful enterprise.

A special thank you to Nancy Berge and her family for their generosity, and to Larry Head, director of the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program, for his dedication to this unparalleled experiential learning and design curriculum in higher education.

Bear Down, and support our Wildcat engineers!