One of the local rounds of European BEST Engineering Competition (EBEC) took place in Copenhagen on 27th and 28th February 2012 and was a very successful event. Students from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) competed in two categories: Team Design and Case Study, for a chance to go to Stockholm for the regional phase of EBEC and for the prizes offered by the sponsors: Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC) and Maersk.
From the 1st of February, EBEC Copenhagen was promoted on DTU campus and their students were made aware of the event by posters, leaflets, presentations at lectures and through social media. BEST Copenhagen received a lot of applications from teams motivated to participate, so it was a very hard task to choose only 16 teams to compete – 8 for each category.
Team Design
On the 27th February, the Team Design competition took place in DTU Library. Benjamin Johansen, main organiser of EBEC Copenhagen, gave a welcome speech and the representatives from MDCC presented the opportunities offered by Microsoft to students and described the task and judging criteria. The 8 teams competing started working on the challenge from MDCC, which was to design a natural user-interface calculator using Microsoft Kinect. After 4 hours of work, all teams presented their creative and original solutions.
Innovation Team, consisting of 4 Danish students in their Bachelor studies, won. Each of the members of the winning team received a Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle and t-shirts from Microsoft, plus the transportation tickets to Stockholm, where they will compete in the next phase of the competition.
Case Study
On the 28th February it was time for Case Study. Eight teams of 4 students each gathered in Glassalen and worked on solving a case proposed by Maersk. The case was about about optimizing oil output in an injector-producer system. After no less than 3 hours of brainstorming, discussing different possible solutions and trying to figure out the best one, the teams presented their ideas to the jury and answered all their questions.
The jury panel from Maersk considered all 8 solutions provided by the students were very good and liked the different approaches to solve the problem, so they had a hard time choosing the winners. After a long deliberation, they decided that the winning team is The MEK Mafia, consisting of four Danish students in their 4th year of MSc in Engineering Design and Applied Mechanics. Each of them won a Samsung Galaxy S II and the transportation tickets to Stockholm for the next phase of the competition, which will take place from the 1st to the 5th of April.
Conclusions
Both days ended with a delicious buffet dinner and champagne, where participants had the chance to network with organisers from BEST Copenhagen and with company representatives. Everyone seemed to have a very good time 🙂
BEST Copenhagen wants to thank everyone involved in this event and to wish plenty of good luck to the teams representing DTU in the next phase of the competition (EBEC Nordic). We are sure that they will make us proud in Stockholm, when competing against the best teams from Northern Europe.
We are already dreaming about the next edition of EBEC Copenhagen. Are you? 🙂