Campus News
WHAT’S HAPPENING
New Structural Testing Lab Providing Realistic Civil Eng. Experiences A new structural testing laboratory is engaging civil engineering students in high-impact experiential learning exercises. Students can gain valuable insight into the behavior of large-scale structures and building foundations, and then utilize that knowledge to become better design engineers. The facility’s equipment inside a building on the expanded campus space and former Hulman family property is primarily being used in courses examining the structural design of concrete and steel, geotechnical engineering, construction and foundation engineering, and structural design in prestressed concrete. The lab provides students the opportunity to work with testing capabilities typically only available at larger research universities. Rose-Hulman shared a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program to establish the lab. The facility was organized by professors Kyle Kershaw and Matt Lovell, a 2006 civil engineering alumnus.
Students Excel in SWE PepsiCo Engineering Challenge Chemical engineering students Rachel Shubella (left in photo) and Christina Gray passed a new version of the Pepsi Challenge this winter, earning second-place honors in the PepsiCo and Society of Women Engineers’ 2019 Student Engineering Challenge. It had female U.S. collegiate student teams developing ideas for the company’s Food for Good initiative. The duo proposed a way to improve the cleaning process of the company’s transport totes, used to deliver millions of beverage products annually across the country.
Their idea: using a supercritical carbon dioxide-based cleaning system to replace PepsiCo’s current wipe-down cleaning, an inconsistent process that wastes water and chemicals. The students made a formal presentation before a panel of judges, including PepsiCo officials, at the 2019 SWE Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif. A team from the University of Texas earned first-place honors, while students from the University of Illinois were third.
Online Connecting with Code Camp a Hit with Kids Rose-Hulman’s first free online Connecting with Code computer programming camps was a huge success, thanks to David Fisher, a 2000 mechanical engineering alumnus. The camps introduced more than 5,000 registrants late this spring to computing, robotics and creating their own computer games. Kids in kindergarten through third grade used Scratch programming to create their own games, while the Tinkercad website allowed students in grades 4-8 to learn software development and simple engineering skills. Over the course of five days, instruction and projects covered such basic concepts as 3D modeling,
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Arduino coding, electrical circuits and coding blocks. “Each day we showcased a new game that we build together in a video and we gave kids an assignment for additional features they could add. It’s a great way to start coding,” says Fisher, professor of computer science, software engineering and mechanical engineering.
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The online camps were so successful, more online events are being planned in the future. Events will be announced at www.connectingwithcode.org/home.
