ME Design Day: Celebrating our Students' Best Works

We celebrate the best works of our Mechanical Engineering students with the Design Day event, where our senior students present their final year projects in a high-profile event attended by university dignitaries, faculty members, students' families, and TV crew.

Awardees of the Design Day (Fall 2014)

For the Fall 2014 semester, we introduced the following to improve our organization.

Strict program management

With 13 groups presenting in a 4-hour program, students were given only 10 minutes to present and 5 minutes of Q&A. Students were advised to rehearse their presentations (they were refered to see TED examples). Timing keeping was very strict. The sound from the microphone was cut beyond the alloted time.

Expert Panel of Judges

Awards for the best works

We are grateful for the generous sponsorship of Delta Corporation for providing the cash awards of QAR 18,000 (~USD 5,000) for the teams with the best presentation, poster, and project documentation.

The winners with Prof. Elsadig Mahdi, Head of Department

Immediate evaluation

Easily, 13 groups, 3 categories, and 10 members of the judging panel create encoding challenge in providing immediate results for the awarding ceremony at the end of the program. The typical approach in doing this task is through paper and pen evaluation where someone collects the data and tabulates the scores. We departed from that tedious task by using online score sheets where the judges entered their scores using their smart phones or laptops.

Overall, the Fall 2014 Design Day was an organizational success.