Student Competitions

Elsevier Opens Latest Engineering Academic Challenge

• By Michael Hart
• 10/05/16

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 11^th 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."