Fourth year students present: Projects for a Better World

More than 470 final projects in 12 departmental programs were submitted and presented this year as part of the multi-departmental conference – “Engineering the Future” in Ashdod and in departmental conferences in Be’er Sheva.

Conference participants included faculty members, researchers, industry executives, entrepreneurs and experts in the field.

As part of the engineering degree requirements, students completing their fourth year studies present their engineering projects that combine entrepreneurship and innovation and connect engineering and society.

At the multi-departmental conference in Ashdod, Prof. Shlomo Mark, Dean of the Engineering at the Ashdod campus, underscored the challenges facing graduates in the digital age: “In today’s digital age, that is characterized by ‘digital disorders’, an engineer of the future must be innovative, creative, flexible when it comes to changes, multi-disciplinary, a learner and keep up-to-date with technological advancements. The projects you presented here reflect everything you learned in your degree studies. I know that you leave the SCE to enter the employment market as curious and creative engineers who know how to learn all the time, to identify trends and navigate a changing digital world.”

One of the projects was the bionic hand built by Boris Trauyin and Yevgeni Shapolansky, students in the mechanical engineering department. The two students designed a smart bionic hand that is controlled by brainwaves and costs only 1,000 dollars. The hand is printed using 3D technology and receives commands from a head sensor that reads the brainwaves, transmits the command to a computer in the bionic hand and instructs the hand how to operate. The students designed the project with the help of Captain Ziv Shilon who lost his hand during military activity in the southern Gaza Strip and currently needs a bionic hand.

On the Be’er Sheva campus the mechanical engineering department project conference was part of “Mechanical Engineering Week”, where fourth year students presented projects and engineering prototypes, among others to an international judging committee. The project focused on five main fields: energy, control, robotics and mechatronics, product engineering, materials properties and research.

In the software engineering department the students were asked to present an innovative product in the software field. The projects offered solutions in fields such as vehicles, safety control and Big Data, addressing municipal, state and societal issues.