Engineering Students at the University of Texas at Austin recently worked with students at a university in southwest India on the already well known One Laptop per Child program. Five Seniors in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at UT-Austin collaborated together in two teams with five students at Amrita University in developing a prototypical solar charger for the computer, along with power management software, and in developing a low bandwidth e-learning system for delivering lectures to students in remote areas. The e-learning system will continue to be worked on in the coming year by a new team, while students who participated in the program last year credit it with helping improve communication and teamwork skills.
The senior design sequence is designed to help ensure that students graduating with an ECE degree are adequately prepared to enter an international workforce and become part of teams working on complex projects. This two-semester sequence teaches students skills such as risk and project management and allows them to explore professional-grade tools for capturing their designs and supporting the collaboration. In addition to the multi-institutional option, senior design projects can also be multi-disciplinary, leading, for example, to teams that blend EE and mechanical engineering students.
During the pilot offering of the multi-institutional senior design option, five students at UT and five students at Amrita University in southwest India divided into two cross-institutional teams. Both teams targeted the One Laptop Per Child platform. One team developed the prototype for a solar charger with power management software. The other team developed the prototype of a low-bandwidth e-learning system designed to deliver lectures to remote locations in third-world countries. A new multi-institutional team will continue work on the e-learning system during the 2008-2009 academic year. A participant in the pilot offering reports, “This project taught me how to deal with an international team. Dealing with the cultural, lingual, and time differences made me more confident and improved my communication skills. We got to know the people in India and became a wonderful team with great spirit and enthusiasm.”