Welcome Letter From the Dean

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Welcome to 2023 Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Day

For the first year ever, students have access to a dedicated design center.

Craig M. Berge Design Day is a story of remarkable student success and the ways engineers improve lives.

We have much to be thankful for this year, including a dedicated Engineering Design Center for students, which
bolsters the college’s commitment to experiential learning over all four years. Every engineering student now has
24-7 access to a spacious, well-equipped, safe place to collaborate and build.

People Helping People

Our seniors are thrilled to tell you about their projects. Not only are the designs a testament to their technical
agility and creativity, but also the projects show why the college’s graduates are highly sought after in
industry and government.

Students worked on ways to make mining and farming more sustainable: 3D-printed construction materials from
tailings, an autonomous spider for collecting agricultural data, algae to reduce greenhouse gases, and solar energy
covers for canal water evaporation. Teams developed a basketball shooting robot and an interactive model of
the Tucson power grid to educate children. They created a haptic imaging device for blind scientists and airplane
controls for armless pilots. They designed ways to keep people and animals safer – a drone to monitor wildfires,
throw phone for hostage negotiations, and pet and livestock tracker, to name just a few. There are medical devices,
robots for space exploration, and wastewater recycling projects, not to mention a BattleBot!

If you miss anything at Design Day, you can still learn about the 99 projects online in the students’ presentation
videos, which will be available following the awards ceremony, where $47,000 in prize money will be presented.

Please join us on campus for the Design Day Awards ceremony at 4 p.m. on May 1 to recognize the accomplishments of our seniors. And, if you miss anything, you can still learn about the 99 projects online in the students’ presentation videos, which will be available following the awards ceremony, where $47,000 in prize money will be presented.

Thank You for Your Support

Design Day and the Interdisciplinary Capstone Course are part of a lineup of competitions, maker fests, major-specific design courses, entrepreneurial and business instruction, and industry and community projects in the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program. The program immerses undergraduates at all levels in real-world experiences that integrate design, manufacturing and commercialization.

None of it would be possible without all the hard work behind the scenes. We are grateful to the students, donors, program mentors, university and industry partners, sponsors, judges, faculty, staff, and alumni who make the program a highly successful enterprise.

A special thank you to Nancy Berge and her family for their generosity, and to Larry Head, director of the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program, for his dedication to an unparalleled experiential learning program and design curriculum in higher education.

Bear Down, and support our Wildcat engineers!

David W. Hahn

Craig M. Berge Dean, College of Engineering