Posted on April 8: IBM challenges software engineering students

default-hero-image

April 8, 2004

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Team1_SenThesis_opt.jpg” caption=”TestBot team with IBM reps”]Software engineering students built innovation with Lego in the fourth annual IBM competition.

In the capstone software engineering senior thesis course, teams of students competed in a competition that involved building a material testing lab using the Lego Mindstorms product. Lego Mindstorms is an educational product that combines standard Lego bricks with motors, sensors, gears, wheels and belts.

A team of five students won the challenge, judged by IBM representatives. The winning team, called “TestBot”, created a material testing laboratory for both hardware and software which would conduct tests and output data to the user.

“We were given just the Lego Mindstorms kit to create the hardware with,” said team leader Samer Fahmy. “Our specific solution was purely written in Java and we focused our design of both the hardware and software on three principals, ease of use, ease of setup/maintainability, and adaptability. Every design decision made relates to these three principals and the end user was always in mind. The end user being primarily a first-year engineering student, but also industry users. The software on the PC fully controls the hardware and plots graphs and displays data to the user in a way which is very intuitive and easy to use. And the embedded software on the hardware is written in a way to allow full control of motion.”

“The students this year did an exceptional job,” said Spencer Smith, professor of the thesis course. “They started from a real engineering problem and were able to use a combination of technical skills and theory to develop an impressive set of solutions. They should be proud of the work that they have accomplished.”

Three IBM representatives visited McMaster recently to hear the students present their projects.

“IBM is very proud to be the sponsors for this year's senior thesis project,” said Nadine Nichols, manager of human resources for IBM Toronto Software Development Labs. “Everyone did a great job.”

Other TestBot team members include Zhen Cai, Yuan Fang, Jamie Mitchell and Mark Pavlidis. Each team member was awarded $250. The second place team was “Team 7 Inc.” Team members included Ramez, Mousa (team leader), Hao Wang, Andrew Ross, Ning Yan and Derek Lunn. Team members received $100.

Photo caption: TestBot team members, from left, Yuan Fang, Jamie Mitchell, Zhen Cai, IBM representatives Nadine Nicols and Mark Pavlidis, TestBot team leader Samer Fahmy, and IBM representatives Tarah Johnston and Sam Kiosses.