Student Competitions
Elsevier Opens Latest Engineering Academic Challenge
Elsevier's Engineering
Academic Challenge 2016 will begin Oct. 10. For each of the
following five
weeks, college students will be asked to solve a specific problem-set
focused
on the following themes: Future of Energy, Future of Making and Future
of Medicine.
To solve the problems,
students will have access to Elsevier's Knovel database and Engineering Village's Ei Compendex database.
Now in its 11th year, the academic challenge was previously called the Knovel Academic
Challenge. The competition challenges were drafted by a team of
engineering
students at Pennsylvania's Drexel University.
Weekly winners of the
challenge — which students can now register for — will receive a
$100 Amazon
gift card. The overall grand prize winner, with the highest
accumulation of
points over the five-week period, will receive an Apple iPad and the
second-place finisher will get a Sonos speaker.
Participants can view a webinar to learn how to use the
two databases they will have access to. Ei
Compendex has more than 18 million records from engineering
publications
spanning 190 engineering disciplines from 1970 to the present. Knovel
is a
decision-support software system designed to help engineers answer technical
questions using data from more than 120 providers.
Besides using the challenge
platform to register, participants can use it to set up
profiles with avatars,
track how they are doing against other players and other universities
and share
the results over a variety of social media channels.
"Game-based learning, such as
Elsevier's Engineering Academic Challenge, helps to prepare students
for the
workforce," said Antonios Kontsos, associate professor of mechanical
engineering at Drexel. "Gaming is the closest analogy to how students
learn
today."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.
