By Ashley Lamp
First-year courses at the College of Engineering offer new students experiments that enforce learning through experience. At the end of each year, the students choose from three experimental project ideas: nanotechnology exploration, robot technology or rollercoaster creation, to showcase the skills they’ve learned.
Many of the students chose nanotechnology projects, where, with financial and logistical support from Ohio State’s Center for Affordable Nanoengineering of Polymer Biomedical Devices, they created and tested their own “lab-on-a-chip” devices at the end of spring quarter in addition to visiting nanotechnology research laboratories across campus.
Honors students created nanotechnology devices to incubate yeast cells and set them in channels on their chips. The cells adhere to the channel, and the students must test the strength of the adhesion to determine whether a smooth or patterned surface affects the results. In order to test this, students pump water through the 100-micrometer deep, 200-micrometer wide and 4-centimeter long channels at different flow rates to measure how fast the water needs to flow in order to remove the cells.
A panel of judges gave awards to the students based on experimental results, procedures and the conclusion.
The first place team included Rahim Bamba, Kimberly Hoang, Katie Reinaker and Thomas Yeh. Second place was given to Alex Katko, Jon Picking, Michael Thacker and Steve Woodward. Third place team members were Greg Ebersole, Serra Elliot, Tosh Otani and Ryan Vitale.
Other students created a different “lab-on-a-chip” using Autodesk Inventor CAD software to create molds from a photolithography process. The students designed the devices to measure concentrations of fluorescein, a biocompatible fluorescent chemical. After creating the chips they competed in categories of most accurate reading, best project documentation and best oral presentation.
Winners were announced for each of two sections of the course. In measurement accuracy, the first section winners were Han Lei Lock, Amber Mohler, Jerrod Slack and Nathan Smith. The second section winning team members were Christopher Hartley, Michael Corcoran and Byoung Woo Chu. In project documentation, first section winners were Patrick Evans, Tyler Fondriest, Eric Hogan and Christopher McManus. Second section honors went to Eric Bergen, Ti’Air Riggins and Ashton VanDemark. The oral presentation winners in the first section were Adam Knoll, Sandeep Komini, Kevin Stamper and Jingyi Sun. The second section awardees were Greg Schwehm, Jugal Shrestha, Kevin Nyers and Sean Ewing.
These competitions highlight the college’s First-Year Engineering program, which combines lectures, projects and labs. Along the way, the students learn team-building, project management and communication skills through oral presentations and research exercises; find out about all the college has to offer, such as participation in student-led projects like the Buckeye Bullet; and have interaction with senior faculty members and industry representatives. The program was initiated with a grant from the Nanotechnology in Undergraduate Education program at the National Science Foundation.
To read about the robot and rollercoaster competitions, click here.
For more information about the First-Year Engineering Program, visit http://engineering.osu.edu/fe/index.php. For details on the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors program, go to http://feh.eng.ohio-state.edu/.
Ashley Lamp is a communications assistant at the College of Engineering.
