Fall 2025
Precollege Student Voting: During the morning on Design Day all visiting precollege students will be viewing Engineering Projects and voting.
During this time, college students will have a chance to interact with “non-engineering” students and demonstrate the underlying principles from their projects. This interaction allows the college students an opportunity to practice explaining engineering concepts to non-engineers. As the precollege students work their way through the wide variety of presentations, they will get an overview of the many different branches of engineering. Additionally, as the precollege students see both entry-level and advanced engineering applications, it allows them to see the natural progression of engineering. Lastly, this session also provides a chance for the precollege students to interact with student organizations within the College of Engineering.
The following schools and groups will be participating in this Fall’s Design Day events: Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP), East Lansing High School (ELHS), Innovation Central High School (ICHS), and Oakland Schools Technical Center (OSTC).
| 1279 Anthony Hall Auditorium: Check-in for all schools | K’NEX Bridge Team Build Room 2245 | VEX Robotics Room 2400 | 1st & 2nd Floor Project Viewing | LED Labyrinth Competition Room 2250 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00am-8:15am | Check in for all schools | ||||
| 8:15am-8:30am | Welcome and Voting procedures – Drew Kim, Assistant to Dean, and Luis Donado, Assistant Director | ||||
| 8:40am-9:30am | OSTC | DAPCEP | ICHS | ELHS | |
| 9:35am-10:20am | DAPCEP | ICHS | ELHS | OSTC | |
| 10:25am-11:10am | ICHS | ELHS | OSTC | DAPCEP | |
| 11:15am-12:00am | ELHS | OSTC | DAPCEP | ICHS | |
| 12:15pm-12:30pm | Awards Ceremony, 1345 Engineering Building | ||||
Members of the Organizing Committee For High School Innovation & Creativity Day
Drew Kim
MSU Engineering Assistant to the Dean Recruitment, Scholarships, and K-12 Outreach
Dean Buggia
Instructor and Technology Teacher, Okemos High School
Luis Donado
Assistant Director of MSU Engineering Recruitment and K-12 Outreach
Bob Watson
MSU Engineering K-12 Outreach LEGO and VEX Robotics Coordinator
Events
Our team of experts has designed a lab experience to give precollege students an introduction to robots. Students will work in small groups and have a hands-on approach learning to control the VEX robot. They will write programs using Robot C language, and they will program the robot to be controlled by a remote control. Application and discovery of how programming works will be similar to lessons presented in science and math classes. Each team will discover how to adjust their programs based upon the program inputs and actual output (robot performance). During each phase, new challenges will be introduced to engage the students. This will reinforce new ideas and concepts while exposing students to the newly emerging capabilities of student-controlled robotics programs.
In this build you and your team will be integrating practices from multiple fields of engineering to build and evaluate a support system. Support systems can range from simple beams to intricate bridges composed of gussets, trusses, cables, etc. These types of systems are used throughout Civil, Mechanical and Structural Engineering works. This session will start with a brief introduction to the forces and stresses that act on support systems. Additionally, you will see how digital sensors can read and convey data about these stresses to a computer. We will also look at the computer code that takes this raw data and converts it into a format that can easily be interpreted.
During the build portion of this session, you and your team will be given the design constraints for the structure. Utilizing the information learned at the start of the session and the limited materials provided, your team will need to design and then construct a model to be tested. Your finished structure will be placed on one of our test beds for evaluation. With the help of MSU Engineering students, the results will be collected by a sonic ranging sensor. These data points will be interpreted by the computer program and your team will be evaluated on percent deflection of your support. Throughout this session you will need to listen, learn and utilize your team to be successful. Good Luck.
The circuit activity at Design Day provides students with an opportunity to manipulate the path of the electrical current in a circuit by switches. Using basic principles of circuits and parallel/ series connection concepts, student groups will turn on and off switches to direct current in a premade electrical circuit with LEDs indicating each active branch.
Since an LED allows the current to pass through in only one direction, students should identify the different paths they create by activating different branches, which might be connected in series or in parallel. The event will be scored by how many LEDs can be turned on without breaking the closed circuit.
