By Abhinav Kongari
Organised by
Engineers Without Borders (EWB) and The University of Makerere, Global
Engineering Challenge is a week where marvellous ideas are produced and
unforgettable memories are made. Recreating a 9-5 work place environment, the
students are tasked to work on an engineering project in interdisciplinary
groups. The entire Faculty of Engineering is divided into multiple hubs and each
hub housed 7-8 groups, administered by a facilitator. The most unique thing is
that none of the hubs has more than one group working on a single type of
project and this maintains the individuality and innovativeness.
This year the
main focus area was the region around Bambui in Cameroon. Project topics ranged
from Water Supply to Transport to Hygiene. All of these categories were
suggested by academics from University of Makerere in Uganda and were based on
real life issues. Having given you all an idea of what GEC was, let me take a
more personal perspective on the competition.
I’m a Mechanical
Engineering student and in my group I had students from the Department of
Material Science Engineering and Aerospace Engineering. When these 3
disciplines work in a team, projects usually involve construction of buildings
or automobiles or something similar. Our project was to devise an Anti-Poaching
system for the African forest elephants in the Bamenda-Banso highlands in
Cameroon. We had to have a cheap and robust solution and individual tagging of
animals was discouraged. Having never met each other, the first day was spent
on either arguing or sitting in silence. But, gradually we grew accustomed to
each other, realised our strengths and weaknesses and started working on the
project. The whole week was similar to a healthy symbiotic relationship where I
got the opportunity to teach my teammates something new and vice-versa. The
final solution that we came up with involve the usage of solar-powered drones
to monitor the forest.
Everything
related to drones usually involves computer programming and we had no Computer
Science students in our teams. What did we do? We researched and learned the
way to program drones through Arduino circuits, determined the angles at which
they’d have to fly and even the view of their lenses. Even though we had no
prior experience of the essential skill, we designated parts of the job
according to individual strengths and then shared the knowledge amongst each
other. Eventually, we were able to incorporate the idea in our project and
completed it in time. I believe this was the prime motive of GEC, i.e. to find
out the solution through teamwork and using each other’s strengths to succeed.
The week had 3 major milestones:
1)
Completing the project
It took a lot of
effort. We had many failures and there were times when we had to start over
again but we persevered and never lost heart. Finally, at the end of the week
we came up with a design that we were proud of. Throughout the project, we
learnt from each other’s mistakes and supported one another to every extent. It
was my first project working in an interdisciplinary team and it shall be etched
in my memory forever.
2)
Interaction on Alumni Day
We had the
privilege of having Mr. Barry Tan as our guest speaker on the Alumni Day. Being
a recent Alumni and having worked in prestigious companies like SNC-lavalin,
Mr. Tan shared amazing experiences and also gave some profound advice. Talking
about his past mistakes and experiences, he suggested students to get involved
in co-curricular activities, participate in competitions and do as many
internships as possible. His best statement of the day - ‘Don’t do a Barry’
3)
Winning the competition
All the hard
work and effort was finally rewarded when we were awarded the ‘best
communicated solution’ for our project. It was a great experience and I’m glad
GEC provided me with this opportunity.
Finally, all I’d
say is that GEC was a mixed experience for everyone. Some people were lucky to
have hardworking and passionate people in their group while others were not so
lucky. I believe this was a reflection of how life usually is. Not everything
is always according to our choices but as long we persevere, everything
eventually falls in the right direction.
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