Our stories.
Prototypes and Communication.
Prototypes serve as more than the first model of a product — they also are valuable communication tools between team members, external stakeholders and end-users. While prior work has demonstrated that professional engineers frequently rely on prototypes to communicate, preliminary data suggests that undergraduate engineering students struggle to use prototypes effectively.
Building it Right.
For companies developing new products, creating a physical prototype is a risky undertaking. If a prototype fails, the time and monetary resources put behind it are wasted, meaning designers, engineers and companies must put more time and money into creating a new prototype for testing.
The shift to digital.
The unexpected transition to online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many changes for undergraduate students and their instructors. To understand the magnitude of these impacts and potentially improve digital learning, researchers in the Penn State School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs (SEDTAPP) have received $196,136 from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The cost of “free complexity”.
The National Institutes of Standards and Technology cite qualification of Additive Manufacturing (AM) components as one significant barrier that will derail the adoption and use of AM more broadly. AM has fundamentally shifted the way designers design, by enabling the production of “impossible” geometries within aerospace, automotive, and biomedical industries. Designers need a tool to help them compose inherently more inspectable AM parts.
Maker Ambassadors.
Born out of a collaboration between the BUILD Nights and the Engineering Leadership Development (ELD) program, Maker Ambassadors provides training to women and and other traditionally underrepresented engineering students who plan, promote, lead and execute the BUILD Nights held at the Bernard M. Gordon Learning Factory.
Exploring the behaviors of Startups.
For startup companies the risks of new product development are high. In this work, we will track the factors that affect startup success for companies around the Mid-Atlantic region over the course of a five year grant. Our goal is to build a model that identifies when a startup may be headed towards disaster, so we can course correct.