2/17/2026 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
This past fall, multiple Senior Capstone Design (ME 470) teams had the opportunity to foray into engineering education by developing project and demonstration materials for other required MechSE courses.
Teaching Assistant Professors Kellie Halloran, Kevin Wandke, and Tom Golecki each advised a team that focused on developing content for a required course. Golecki’s team was sponsored by Halloran’s new Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) Implementation & Exploration Track grant, “Active Learning for Entrepreneurial Mindset at Scale,” which works to create demonstrations that connect to real-life applications for courses in the TAM 2XX sequence (i.e., TAM 210/211, Introduction to Statics; TAM 212, Introductory Dynamics; TAM 251, Introductory Solid Mechanics).
“The overall goal of the SIIP project is to engage students more in lectures in these larger courses,” Halloran said. “We want to give students a better idea of how these courses build and connect upon one another. To do this, we want them to see the same demo, but using different course topics in each of the three courses so that they’re analyzing from different angles and with different assumptions.”
“I’ve noticed in my sections that the students get the most engagement when I am physically doing something in the room, such as a quick demonstration,” Golecki said.
Halloran advised seniors Betty Escobedo, Adrian Marquez, Michael Milke, and Celeste Reynoso, who earned the award for Top Trade Show Display. The team focused on using a skateboard as the platform for three demos.
“When we were brainstorming ideas, our main goal was to create something that students could physically interact with,” Milke said. “We liked the idea of a skateboard because it was super versatile and we could construct a different skateboard for each core topic.”
For statics, this meant placing load cells between the wheels and board so that students could read the force applied when someone stands on the board and use that to solve for reaction forces. For dynamics, the team swapped out the skateboard’s wheels with bicycle wheels so that their angular motion could easily be witnessed and analyzed. For solid mechanics, they designed and machined an aluminum skateboard with strain gauges so that beam bending and strain could be calculated along the board when in use.
Previous experience during these courses was a motivating factor for the team. “I liked the opportunity to help other students and making a fun class demonstration sounded like something really useful,” Escobedo said. “I would have loved to see more demonstrations of theoretical and applied mechanics topics when I first learned these courses, so I wanted to improve the experience.”
“Personally, I loved the introductory TAM courses,” Milke said. “They pushed me to really master some tough problems that set me up for success in my 300- and 400-level courses.”
The team emphasized demonstration safety during their process. “Throughout the design iteration process, we considered student engagement and input on the boards, making sure they were sturdy and safe for them to interact with,” Escobedo said.
“I really loved that this team was excited about thinking through how to make the TAM sequence more engaging,” Halloran said. “They worked together really well.”
Golecki advised seniors Mayas Kumble, Catalina Sophia Murga, Nathan Stamper, and Megan Tang, who came up with a trebuchet as the basis for their demo.
“I was impressed with the breadth of options the team brainstormed for potential demonstrations,” Golecki said of the team’s early work, noting that he left it up to them to select their final idea.
“We wanted a system that was mechanically rich but still intuitive at first glance,” the team said. “A trebuchet naturally combines force balance, rotation, energy transfer, projectile motion, and structural deformation in a single device. It invites students to form predictions—they immediately form expectations about what should happen, which makes the comparison between theory and reality that much more meaningful.”
“I was interested in this project because it sat right at the intersection of engineering theory, physical systems, and how people learn,” Kumble said. “As someone who took all the mechanical courses as a freshman and sophomore, I remember how abstract some of the concepts used to be until I saw them play out in the real world. This project felt like a chance to create something that I wish had existed when I was learning the material.”
The team’s final trebuchet stands two feet tall, with a two feet by one foot base. Its frame is welded together from aluminum square tubes and can support a maximum counterweight of 26 pounds. Its primary arm is also constructed from a square tube and connects to a half-inch solid aluminum rod.
“Our prototyping process was largely informed by existing trebuchet designs and experimental observations from similar systems,” the team said. “We used these references to guide our initial design and then iteratively refined the system through targeted design changes.”
“The design process was highly rewarding because it mirrored a real-world engineering project, requiring us to continuously identify challenges and develop solutions throughout the project,” Stamper said.
Both Halloran and Golecki look forward to seeing the demos used in classrooms starting this semester. “I think [Halloran] and I are willing to take a chance [on the new demos] and see what happens,” Golecki said.
Halloran intends for two more teams to develop additional demonstrations this semester. “All of these demos [will] have some sort of student participation in them,” she said. “There’s an opportunity for students to engage and play.”
Wandke’s team took a different approach, working on developing new project content for ME 370 (Mechanical Design I), which Wandke teaches.
Historically, ME 370 students have been assigned project prompts to construct mechanical, self-propelling prototypes that satisfy specific criteria (see students’ inverted crawlers from last year). While students are encouraged to conduct background research for their projects, and to learn from their peers, the repetition of prompts meant that over time, students would inevitably converge toward a set of optimized project ideas.
“The more semesters that you repeat the project, the variety of solutions gets narrower and narrower,” Wandke said. “Everyone starts to do the same two or three things that work really well. I want the teams to struggle a little bit [to come up with a design idea] because I think that’s where a lot of the learning comes from.”
“I took ME 370 last year and I enjoyed the class, but it is true that the project was one that had been repeated in the past and was slightly less exciting as a result,” said team member Nick Skweres. “Being able to work on developing projects that students would enjoy from the perspective of a student who has already taken the class was a very cool experience.”
ME 370 has two projects each semester—one that emphasizes the design process, and a second that places more importance on the prototype’s final performance.
“The first project is designed to grade students on their ability to follow a design process, which allows students who are struggling to manufacture a prototype to fail a bit more gracefully,” Wandke said. “The second project is very performance driven, with engineering standards that need to be met.”
Wandke advised seniors Ian Chroniak, Christian Hausman, Aiden Lefler, Yule Lin, and Skweres, who developed content for a new version of each of these two projects. After generating an initial list of 35 project concepts, the team sought feedback from students in ME 170 (Computer-Aided Design) to narrow down the list.
“We were able to send [the ME 170 class] a form that gauged interest level for each of our initial project concepts, and we received close to 200 responses,” the team said. “From the results, we identified the top 16 most interesting projects.”
The team then entered an extensive ideation process, during which they used decision matrices, product specifications, and early evaluations from student feedback to narrow the list to three final concepts. From these, they selected a customized marble run, which also made for a more seamless transition to the second project—a walking parade float that would carry the marble run.
“The marble run was somewhat similar to previous introductory projects for the course, yet different enough to warrant being run as a new item,” the team said. “It had many attractive elements that fit our criteria: a variety of designs and creative potential for theming, it could be hand-driven by a single crank input, and it could easily be built in the Jackson Innovation Studio.”
For the walking component, the team developed two versions—a carnival walker that could test for stability using an accelerometer, which had not been measured previously in the course, and an all-terrain walker that would introduce novel terrain-based capability requirements.
“It was fun to iterate on our designs to figure out new potential solutions,” Hausman said. “We were pretty much retaking the class but with the ability to modify and adjust the project constraints as we went, which it made it extremely interesting when determining how students would handle challenges since we had faced them as well.”
“I enjoyed thinking about the project from a younger student’s perspective, trying to remember how I would have thought about it a year ago so that I could predict how new ME 370 students will solve the challenges we created for them,” Lefler said.
For the team, being able to have an impact on ME 370 held special meaning.
“ME 370 was a course I really enjoyed,” Chroniak said. “It was one of the first times we were able to utilize the engineering skills we had been building in years prior, and it was fun to do so in a project-based setting.”
“After taking ME 370 and ME 371, I learned a great deal about how to design and build mechanical systems,” Lin said. “There are many experiences I would like to share with students taking ME 370, especially to help them have a smoother and more rewarding experience during their first opportunity to design and build a project.”