I was invited to be an external judge at the Taylor’s Engineering Fair 2013 last week. I was assigned judging for their Capstone Project Prize, which is essentially a culmination of all the student’s knowledge.
While most of the teams were quite okay, I was disappointed with several teams who exhibited little cooperation and teamwork. I got particularly cheesed when a group member took a phone call while the others were presenting their group work.
I was also particularly hard on one team, as one of the members was our previous intern at AESTE. I really asked them a lot of questions to make sure that they knew what they were doing. I also wanted to make sure that our previous intern wasn’t screwing up their project – she was doing it fine.
Overall, it was a good experience plus the projects were pretty decent. One team had a really good design for a human powered vehicle but failed in the engineering sense when they did not have the data to prove that their design was the best. A little unfortunate but a common theme across the teams.
Finally, I have to laud Taylor’s University for using external judges for their student projects. Most universities do not do this and prefer just having internal project judging. It’s risky involving external evaluators as we’re usually quite strict.
I know that I am. (:
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